"... Trump is putting the moderators on notice that they have no business playing an aggressive role in trying to inform the public about whether what the candidates are saying is true or not." Screw you #Lyin'Donald-- we want the truth!

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Donald Trump to debate moderators: Don't even think about fact-checking me
By Greg Sargent, September 23, 2016

This is a remarkable exchange from a recent interview with Donald Trump on “Fox and Friends”: 

Questioner: “Lester Holt — should he be a moderator, and just ask questions, or should he be a fact-checker, where he asks a question, and if somebody says something that he thinks is wrong, that he’s gonna try to correct the record? What would you like to see — a moderator, or a fact-checker?”

Trump: Well, I think he has to be a moderator. You’re debating somebody, and if she makes a mistake, or if I make a mistake, we’ll take each other on. But I certainly don’t think you want Candy Crowley again.

Questioner: (Snickers knowingly.) “She was wrong!”

Trump: “I really don’t think you want that. That was a very pivotal moment in that debate. And it really threw the debate off. And it was unfair. So I don’t think you want that. No, I think you have to have somebody that just lets ‘em argue it out.

“You know, I think there’s a lot of pressure on Lester. I think Lester’s a very good person, a very good man. I think there’s a lot of pressure on him. You know, when I had the town hall … with Hillary (Clinton), I did well, and I had tough questions. But the polls all had her taking a drubbing. ...They went after Matt Lauer, and I’ve never seen anything like it. ... That’s what they’re doing with Lester Holt … and a lot of people are watching to see whether he succumbs to that pressure.”

As you may recall, during one of the 2012 debates, CNN’s Candy Crowley gently pointed out that Mitt Romney was wrong when he said President Barack Obama had not immediately called the Benghazi attacks an “act of terror.”

The wrath of Romney supporters bore down on Crowley for days in the wake of this shocking transgression. But, despite the snickering on “Fox and Friends” about this, Crowley was basically right: On the day after the attacks, Obama said: “no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation.”

It would not be unreasonable for the upcoming debates’ moderators to hear Trump’s allusion to Crowley and conclude that if they challenge him on the facts, they can expect to be subjected to days and days of rage and abuse from his surrogates and supporters, just as she was. After all, as he put it, “a lot of people” (i.e., his supporters) will see such conduct as “succumbing” to pressure from Hillary Clinton supporters, and they’re “watching” for that.

It’s true, as Trump argues, that Clinton and her supporters went hard after Lauer after the recent town hall, because they were unhappy with his soft questioning of Trump, and that many went on to cite the Lauer failure as a cautionary tale for the debate moderators to avoid. This, as Trump notes, is also a form of pressure and ref-gaming.

But the careful observer will note an important difference here. Many of those who criticized Lauer’s performance faulted him for failing to challenge Trump’s well-documented falsehoods in real time (in particular, his claim that he opposed the Iraq War). By contrast, Trump is telegraphing that his supporters will hammer the moderators if they do challenge his well-documented falsehoods in real time.

In other words, one side wants the moderators to hold the candidates accountable, and the other doesn’t. We can argue endlessly over whether those in the former camp are trying to game the debates so that Trump faces tougher questioning than Clinton. But the bottom line is that, given that it is simply true that Trump lies a lot more frequently, audaciously and egregiously than Clinton, and that it took many months before this was widely acknowledged in the press, most Clinton supporters would probably be just fine with equivalent treatment of both of their assertions at the debate, and if they aren’t, they should be.

Some have argued that when it comes to how the moderators conduct the debates, there is an important difference between fact-checking the candidates and subjecting them to persistent follow-up questions, and that moderators should focus on the latter. But in a way, the distinction isn’t really that important here. Trump essentially stated outright on Fox above that the moderators’ proper role should be to get out of the way entirely and let the candidates go at it with one another — a free-for-all format that he probably expects to dominate, given his reality TV experience.

In other words, Trump is putting the moderators on notice that they have no business playing an aggressive role in trying to inform the public about whether what the candidates are saying is true or not. It’s hard to imagine that any self-respecting journalist would willingly submit to Trump’s directive.
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