In a fiery speech Thursday night, former President Donald Trump ripped ABC News and its anchor David Muir for violating ironclad agreements with his campaign while moderating the September 10th debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Speaking at Trump Tower, the 45th president accused the network of consorting with Harris to place him at a three-on-one disadvantage on that. Muir was joined by Linsey Davis who Trump said falsely fact-checked him about statements made during the debate. When he stated that crime in the U.S. is on the rise, Muir rushed to repeat a controversial mainstream talking point that criminal activity is generally on the decline.
“And during the debate, I mentioned that and David Muir, a real lightweight,” Trump said on Fox News. “I had one against three, but I think we did great. But David Muir of ABC, fake news, when I said that crime is way up in our country, he corrected me, he corrected me and so much and it was right what I said. He didn’t correct [Vice President Kamala Harris] one time, and what she said was wrong, absolutely wrong. So many different— Charlottesville, she was wrong, all of the different things, almost everything she said, and she was never corrected. But he corrected me on crime. He said, ‘No, no, crime has not gone up.’ I said crime has gone up massively. He said, ‘I’d like to state for the record that crime has not gone up.’”
Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra, other organizations like the National Crime Victimization Survey cite statistics showing urban crime is up. Conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the survey asked 230,000 Americans whether they had been the victim of recent violent crimes. Based on their responses, and excluding simple assault — the least likely violent crime to be charged as a felony — crime in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019.
It was instances such as the tussle over crime stats, Trump said, that violated an agreement his campaign believed it had reached with ABC about letting the discussion remain free-flowing without interjections from the moderators. “Now you don’t know this, but we had a deal with ABC that there will be no corrections of any kind, and they violated the deal. Why? Because they’re bad people, and they’re fake news,” Trump said. “So he did it many times to me during the debate. He violated the deal. That’s the deal, because you can take anything and try and make up stories with it. We had a deal where that wouldn’t happen. You could do whatever you wanted as soon as the debate was over, but he did it in total violation of what our agreement was. And a lot of people standing right over there [as he looked toward his staff] will tell you exactly what it was, will show you what it was. David Muir has lost all credibility.”
Davis, as well, drew Trump’s ire. “I never heard of her. I never want to hear of her. She was terrible. I don’t know how she ever got her job in the first place,” Trump said. “But we have a country to save, and we can’t have fake news like that. And his ratings deserve to go down.”
Fox News tracked that Muir and Davis face-checked President Trump five times throughout the debate without correcting Harris once. Immediately afterward, Trump called into Fox’s late-night “Gutfield” program to air his grievances. “I think my only regret is that I wanted to be elegant, and I didn’t want to go after the anchors. I wish I did, in a way,” Trump said. “I was very unfairly treated by the anchor. I’m not a fan of those guys anymore – and his hair was better five years ago. That happens with the clock.”
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