The first and possibly only of the rematch presidential debates takes place tonight between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. It happens on CNN, and yes, I ve got thoughts. I m sure you do, too. Join me for what promises to be a whole lot of fun.
00:03:38.320But the audience is an integral part of that.
00:03:41.140So, you know, Donald Trump is obviously relying upon Joe Biden keeling over on stage.
00:03:46.540And he just looks over at his slumped body and says, see, he's old and he might even be dead right now.
00:03:51.920But, you know, for them, it's like in a silent audience, when he is, if Joe Biden is cognizant and Donald Trump is already kind of foreseeing that he might be insane,
00:04:03.840you know, he's juiced up on Adderall and the rest of it, which might be true.
00:05:23.040I think that he's taking an interesting gamble by agreeing to all these kind of rules that take away those natural advantages.
00:05:31.180But part of his gamble, I would imagine, is that he wants this to be unfair against him.
00:05:37.960One of the things that binds his coalition together that bound Republicans together long before Donald Trump showed up, but it's really part of it now, is a sense of aggrievedness towards the media, that the media creates unfair rules.
00:05:53.100And one of the things that you do that you notice when you go back and look at other debates in the past, and I was looking a lot at the first debate last time around between Biden and Trump with Chris Wallace moderating.
00:06:03.640Sometimes it can be pretty loaded against certainly Donald Trump and and also Republicans in a way that that screams out as being kind of unfair.
00:06:13.100There's a lot of CNN and Jake Tapper, who I have a ton of respect for, but CNN nonetheless has been spending the last, what, eight years adding the, you know, without evidence.
00:06:23.940Anytime someone who is either Trump or Trump like talks, they sometimes boot people off air if they are seen to be, you know, January 6th election denialist or however they might term it.
00:06:36.140And so I think one of the great challenges for Tapper in particular is to not fall into the, sir, we're fact checking you now and that's just not so kind of thing.
00:06:45.560I predict that that's going to happen.
00:06:48.020And if and when it does, it'll be perceived by the political class as a Trump losing situation.
00:06:55.140But I think it'll be perceived by the audience, what audience that is there.
00:06:58.920And it's not clear that there's going to be a ton of people tuning into this, but it's going to be perceived as yet another example of why the deck is stacked against, you know, 46 percent of the country.
00:07:10.380There will be a ton of people tuning in for this.
00:07:12.260This is like there's nothing going on in the news right now.
00:08:23.780And to see Trump, like what version of him are we going to get?
00:08:27.120Are we going to get magnanimous Trump or are we going to get feisty Trump?
00:08:30.760Are we going to get the one who took out Jeb Bush and was, you know, lowbrow and sort of a great way with Hillary Clinton?
00:08:36.440Or are we going to get the one who sometimes tries to be presidential and charming and smiles a lot and is trying to appeal to those women and independent voters that would really help him?
00:08:46.780Camille, CNN does have a lot at stake tonight.
00:08:49.380But the truth is, you know, for once, we really do have the two candidates with everything to win or lose.
00:08:55.520The latest polls show that only 83 percent of the voters have made up their minds at this point.
00:09:02.560Only 83 that that leaves 17 percent potentially still up for grabs.
00:09:09.320Some have put it as as many as one in four.
00:09:12.580So it could be up to 25 percent undecided.
00:09:15.680And so this may be their one and only chance to decide which one of these guys they prefer.
00:09:21.600And, you know, Camille, it's not like they don't understand what's at issue.
00:09:25.940These are obviously non hard partisans who are still in the I don't know camp.
00:09:30.060But they're looking at these guys thinking Biden is too old and Trump has terrible temperament and they're wanting to see which problem is worse in these 90 minutes.
00:09:42.160Yeah, it's hard to know, though, if this debate is actually a great crucible for trying to determine what's going on in this particular contest.
00:09:49.460That you've got you've got this cavernous studio that both men are going to be standing next to each other and all these bizarre rules.
00:09:56.600You'll you'll kind of sort of hear Trump trying to butt in.
00:10:00.020And I expect at some moment you'll see Biden and old stammering trying to get his thoughts together in some distant voice, just kind of whispering horrible expletives.
00:10:11.460And Biden almost reacting and responding to them in real time, would you stop?
00:10:17.220It's going to be it could turn out to be completely nuts.
00:10:20.540And all of that will be CNN's fault in some respect.
00:10:24.240And rather than getting the like excellent television that Moynihan alluded to earlier, where he's kind of someone is stalking the stage while their opponent talks.
00:10:32.000You've got this bizarre experience where someone is moving their mouths on camera and you can't actually hear what they're saying.
00:10:51.300I do know that they it seems like they've got all sorts of weird terms that the various networks have to obey with respect to how they refer to the debate is like the CNN debate.
00:10:59.020And they won't permit the various elector election debate coordinators to show up and be in the studio again, a cavernous like bubble debate a la the NBA bubble.
00:11:11.320Like there were questions about that forever.
00:11:13.080There will be questions about this forever in much the same way.
00:11:16.300Again, unless someone keels over and dies, which seems to me like a decent probability for this.
00:11:26.760They're not letting outside media really into the debate room.
00:11:30.100So if there is like a moment that happens during a break.
00:11:33.740I mean, I've been sitting up there as the moderator.
00:11:35.620People saw this when we did the News Nation Megyn Kelly debate where Chris Christie came over and got in my grill and it made a lot of headlines because there were other reporters and audience members in there who took pictures of it and it went out.
00:11:48.580And people asked me that they deserve to know that.
00:11:50.900Why did he come over and get in my grill?
00:11:52.560And I spoke to that on my show and explained it.
00:11:55.280Trump came over and yelled at me at one of these debates.
00:12:13.260None of that will happen because CNN won't let outside reporters in there.
00:12:17.720They have a tight lid over this whole thing.
00:12:19.640And if somebody in the room can hear the comments that one candidate is making while his mic is closed, we're totally dependent on CNN to be forthright about reporting it.
00:12:33.600Like you're not going to have a third party who can say, yep, we all heard it in the press room.
00:12:38.140It's no one's going to be in there except for the CNN staffers, which, again, is wrong.
00:12:43.260So that is my most irritating rule that they've set for this debate.
00:12:48.440And that is the mics get cut as soon as a candidate's turn is over, because you can you can get real gold when the candidate comments off mic.
00:13:00.280And I know they're doing it because Trump interrupted a lot during the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden last time.
00:13:20.800But it's it's a disservice to the audience at home to not be able to hear those off the cuff, witty retorts that the candidate can just slip in.
00:13:28.660It was sometimes it takes two seconds.
00:13:30.440It doesn't have to take a full minute where there's stealing time.
00:13:33.460And CNN is so psyched up about its rule, which, again, was clearly a bend of the knee to Biden, that they did a whole segment on how it's going to work.
00:13:47.240Would you look at this ridiculous thing they put together?
00:14:25.420Victor's microphone is off and he's going to interrupt me.
00:14:29.340My volume remains constant while Victor's interruption can be difficult to understand.
00:14:34.140Now, CNN's production team has shared this demonstration with the campaign earlier today, and we're sharing it with you, our viewers, so everyone fully understands how tomorrow night will work.
00:14:56.980I have no idea why you get 40,000 people in the demo at 8 o'clock.
00:15:01.300You literally have a program of people saying, this is what it sounds like when there's no microphone.
00:15:05.520You know, I know this is a video and audio podcast, but I'm mouthing it like they were doing on CNN.
00:15:11.140Lord in heaven, I suspect in some way that CNN thinks that this can actually help them with this sense of bias.
00:15:19.780I mean, if you look back at the Hillary Clinton debate, as I said, I watched it this morning, Trump is constantly saying, you gave her an extra 40 seconds.
00:15:28.560And it's like now, OK, we have hard and fast.
00:15:31.060Everybody has something to prove here.
00:15:33.260As you said, Megan, I mean, CNN has to prove that they're not going to be like they were in every other network was in 2016, 2020, which was, as Matt pointed out, the fact checking thing.
00:15:45.780Because when you fact check one person who, yes, he lies all the time, but everybody lies and it's to different degrees.
00:15:51.880I mean, remember back in the day, people used to say, you know, you're going to cut Medicare.
00:15:55.560And well, no, we're actually trying to slow the growth of Medicare.
00:15:58.320How do you fact check something like that?
00:16:00.280Is it a cut or are you just slowing the growth?
00:16:02.720So you get bogged down in these things, in these fact check things.
00:16:05.600And if CNN was smart about this, they would back up and just allow the people to debate and say, look, we're not thumbing the scale as we've been accused so many times in the past.
00:16:15.880So, you know, as opposed to just going on TV and creating these ludicrous videos about what it sounds like to talk and when a microphone's not working.
00:16:23.600But I think, you know, Trump has a million things.
00:16:37.780Like, is that everyone knows who he is.
00:16:41.540That part of him has been established.
00:16:43.660Imagine if he is just diplomatic and actually, and I know this is a ludicrous idea for a lot of people, but it's actually not.
00:16:50.800Because if you watched him on the All In podcast, in which he gave about an hour and 30, hour and 40 minute podcast, he talked, as we discussed in the fifth column, he talked in a substantive way about policy, like pretty serious responses.
00:17:11.940When the audience isn't there to respond to him and play back with him, just be serious and try to do it in a serious way.
00:17:18.940And you have those undecideds that, as you said, 80 percent versus these kind of roughly 17, 18 percent people who are just on the fence about things.
00:17:27.240Maybe they could say, like, look, maybe he did grow up.
00:17:29.640Maybe he has learned something in this in this period of four years.
00:18:17.800There's an element of of of Biden that I think we're forgetting about, which is that what happens when you repeatedly give him two uninterrupted minutes?
00:18:28.280We've seen a lot of clips and they're all selectively edited clips.
00:18:31.980Now we're hearing cheap fakes or whatever the term of non art is from the White House podium these days.
00:18:37.660But he has a difficult time keeping his track of thoughts.
00:18:41.160That's one reason why if you want to play a drinking game game to drink yourself to death tonight, and I think we all kind of do drink every time Joe Biden makes a numbered list.
00:18:51.260Right. Number one, we're going to fix Medicare.
00:18:53.220Number two, Donald Trump is a crook and a rapist.
00:22:18.640But, of course, remember the last time we said anything, well, or we didn't, but people in the media who are desperate to find these moments, to call them cheap fakes when he needs help off the stage or is wandering off in Normandy or something.
00:22:32.480But, you know, they went back to the State of the Union.
00:22:35.820Everybody was like, aha, that was a slam dunk.
00:22:40.560And it's like, yeah, he was reading from a prompter.
00:22:42.620But if you can't read from a prompter, if that is the bar you've set for the president of the United States, then we are in deep trouble.
00:22:50.940But now this is the first time you're going to have, I mean, because the press, let's be honest, it's not adversarial.
00:22:57.480He doesn't interact with it very much.
00:22:59.600And when he does, it's not particularly adversarial.
00:23:01.760You're going to have the ultimate adversary standing across from you for like an hour and a half, peppering you with insults, questions, challenges to your presidency.
00:23:11.600And that's, of course, why Donald Trump decided to do this, because the presumption is he's not going to be able to handle it.
00:23:59.700But like, that's a totally different skill from being across from another president and being challenged on the intricacies of immigration.
00:29:23.120However, it's the actual substance which kind of blew me away looking at it in hindsight, because a part of what Chris Wallace was doing was being really, really snide.
00:29:33.200And hectoring towards Trump about daring to disagree with his scientists about the science on COVID.
00:29:55.220But, you know, you don't have to wear it all the time.
00:29:57.380And Trump was more right about that than Chris Wallace.
00:30:01.440Wallace was busting his chops of like, sir, do you really believe that the vaccine is going to be available anytime soon?
00:30:07.880Your experts say it's not going to happen until next summer.
00:30:10.220And he's like, no, it's going to happen sooner than that.
00:30:11.760And they spent like minutes on this, like like shaking their damn heads that Trump would dare to disagree with the director of the CDC, Redfield, at the time, who was saying crazy stuff.
00:30:22.420He was saying at that time that masks are just as effective as the vaccine.
00:30:27.440Like history will judge that to be the craziest thing that was echoed when Joe Biden, like said, basically it was true at that debate, much more than Donald Trump's interruptions.
00:30:36.800And it's just odd because all we do by we now sort of mean the journalistic class is that we love to score the style points on all of this.
00:30:52.220And what Joe Biden did and Chris Wallace did in that debate was telegraph the policy and the sort of style of discourse that would be popular among Democrats in the media in 2021 and 2022, which was we are going to pretend we're going to cloak our like total fear factor type of policies about covid, where we're just going to mask two year olds late into 2022.
00:31:15.220In the state of New York and other places, we're going to cloak that in the science.
00:31:20.240We're going to shake our heads witheringly at Donald Trump at all opportunities.
00:31:24.420And we're never going to revise later and say, oh, you know what?
00:31:36.080And that is all out there for you to see in that debate.
00:31:39.260And Chris Wallace's performance is incredibly lopsided against Trump in that, too.
00:31:43.600So, yeah, it was disappointing for Trump, but it was disappointing for him as well.
00:31:46.740Well, the other thing to add to is he missed like sometimes the moderator can fall so in love with his or her own voice and questions that they missed the chance to let the candidates actually debate.
00:31:59.840I know you've got your two minutes and Joe Biden is supposed to have them to answer.
00:32:05.400But when the other candidate is saying, let's mix it up, there is gold there.
00:33:18.080That's what journalists forgot when they were covering Donald Trump.
00:33:20.920And as Matt pointed out before, and I've said this for years in calling it the without evidence factor, which went away, by the way, the second Joe Joe Biden became president, which was a key that was put onto every journalist computer.
00:33:36.460So Donald Trump would say something and then you'd hit the key without evidence because politicians say things without evidence all the time.
00:33:42.680But it was something that Donald Trump does, I think, I would say more frequently than than many.
00:34:02.380It's the democracy dies in darkness without evidence instinct.
00:34:06.940And it's everyone showboating to say, you know, we're doing our job as journalists.
00:34:12.400Your job, to your point, Megan, is to shut up and to back off.
00:34:17.160If you are, I used to tell people, talk to young people about doing interviews.
00:34:21.040And I said, you know, here's the thing.
00:34:22.920Don't have a series of questions because you have your first question to get everything going.
00:34:28.060Because when you're looking at your card, waiting for the next question, you're allowing all these off ramps, which are really, really interesting.
00:34:33.860You're just letting them go because you're waiting for the person to finish to get to the second question.
00:34:38.480And as you point out, the version of that in a debate is this two minute time constraint.
00:34:43.780Let them go if those two minutes are allowing some fireworks.
00:34:47.860Because if it's illuminating to us, the voters, that is the purpose.
00:34:52.460I am not here to say CNN is doing a great job of fact checking because, again, Twitter is not real life.
00:34:59.560That has been the instinct in the last, you know, eight or so years is like, oh, we're going to get killed by the media class and media critics and people on Twitter if we don't fact check everything.
00:35:10.240The American people, by the way, stop condescending to them.
00:35:12.760They're capable of fact checking a lot of things on their own.
00:35:15.040And the other candidate is the fact checker on stage.
00:35:18.740Well, it's going to be hard for them to resist that, Camille, because let's face it, they've spent the past, what, four plus years censoring Donald Trump.
00:35:27.700Remember, like ever since he started doing the stuff about he didn't lose and all that, they got into a panic about letting him have any portion of their airwaves,
00:35:37.260cutting away from him at pressers while he was still president of the United States, then his campaign, cutting that down, repeatedly bailing on him, MSNBC, the same thing.
00:35:47.560Like he can't we can't allow him to speak without us constantly fact checking him.
00:35:52.580They've got a whole what's that guy's name, Daniel.
00:36:26.320We've spent most of our conversation in this this portion of the of the show here talking about the media and how it might screw things up.
00:36:36.120Like there are so many ways that Donald Trump could essentially win this debate by default.
00:36:41.460Like if if CNN's rules just kind of get in the way, if Joe Biden is tripping over himself,
00:36:47.440if the moderators forget that they're supposed to be facilitating a conversation, not being the stars of the show,
00:36:53.040like all of those things not just could happen, but in some respects are likely to happen.
00:36:57.760And all of those things are points in Donald Trump's favor that we can we can critically assess previous debates
00:37:04.580and the degree to which the moderators got things wrong and Joe Biden perhaps overcorrected, not overcorrected,
00:37:11.800but was a bit too eager to agree with what seemed to be like official covid guidance at the time
00:37:20.780and not willing to entertain some of the things that Donald Trump happened to be right about
00:37:25.660and that time has shown happened to turn out right.
00:37:29.140Like they haven't done any of that critical analysis or assessment.
00:37:32.400And it's all an opportunity for Donald Trump to look better than he might have otherwise
00:37:38.360for all of their attempts to kind of safeguard the democracy against Donald Trump to make certain that no one will take him seriously.
00:37:46.380They still don't appreciate how much that project has failed, like just how profoundly it's failed.
00:37:52.100And the fact that it's not a strategy for keeping him out of the White House going forward.
00:38:56.560Then he gets these rules, which Trump said, I'll agree to anything because he's just trying to get him to debate.
00:39:00.840I'll agree to, you know, the mics get cut.
00:39:02.820I'll agree to no studio audience, both of which would have benefited Trump in some ways, as we discussed.
00:39:07.060In other ways, maybe the mic thing wouldn't have.
00:39:08.740So he goes in there with a deck stacked against him.
00:39:12.580And then what you're going to get, I think, is two moderators who are going to try their level best to sound fair because they know they're under scrutiny.
00:39:20.020But I think the bias will appear in the story selection, the topic selection in terms of the questions they bring up.
00:39:25.700They're going to be I'm sure we're going to hear about convicted felon.
00:39:51.220What he didn't refer back to was his own culpability in shutting down Trump's attempt to raise the corruption issues that were already coming to the surface about Joe Biden.
00:43:51.260If I were moderating this debate tonight, that would be my first question.
00:43:55.860Mr. President, four years ago, you sat on this stage and you told the audience members across America that the laptop was disinformation.
00:44:04.840You cited intelligence analysts who said as much.
00:44:08.260You said it was exactly right that the laptop was a product of Russia, Russia, Russia.
00:44:13.780We now know from your own administration that it was real.
00:44:19.420They took the stand, the FBI, in your son's criminal trial and testified under oath that at the time you said that, the FBI knew that laptop was real and the information on it was valid.
00:44:33.300Do you owe the American people an apology tonight for the misleading you did on this stage four years ago?
00:44:53.080If you have a political scandal engulfing your campaign, you call your idiot son, you know, hopefully when he's not on crack and say, is that your laptop, dear lad?
00:45:08.460And like everything else, we blame it on Russia.
00:45:10.420I mean, the questions about Ukraine are more kind of salient now than they were then because we have more information.
00:45:18.560Stuff has come out since then, the sort of Tony Bobulinski stuff, et cetera.
00:45:21.900But one one thing I would say about that is when you it's the moderate should have asked that question in 2020, because when people said, well, this is about his son, it's not about him.
00:45:47.500So who do they go after to say, like, we need somebody of influence in the in the capital, in Washington, D.C., so we'll get his idiot son.
00:45:57.400Right. At what point does a father, a good father who says constantly how much he cares and loves his son, why can he not say to him, this is a very bad look?
00:46:09.180You're taking one hundred and eighty thousand dollars a month from an energy company without having any experience in the energy sector.
00:46:14.800Why do you think they're they're targeting you?
00:46:49.900No one cares if the if the former vice president soon to be president is corrupt.
00:46:56.340Right. That's basically what she's saying.
00:46:58.020No one gives a shit about corruption in the Biden family.
00:47:01.080What we care about is skin color back to my pet issue.
00:47:04.520That's going to be a challenge for Trump tonight, because the biggest way that that bias shows up in these debates is in story selection, in topic selection.
00:47:15.700And there's zero chance these moderators are not going to be interested in similar things, whether it comes to race, whether it comes to January 6th.
00:47:23.960How much time will they spend on the trial?
00:47:26.240Will we hear the name E. Jean Carroll?
00:47:45.400I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM.
00:47:51.120It's your home for open, honest and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal and cultural figures today.
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00:48:06.500Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey and yours truly, Megan Kelly.
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01:21:55.480The listening audience, George W. Bush was speaking.
01:21:58.740Al Gore left his lectern, walked over to GWB in the middle of his remarks, and George W. Bush just looks at him and nods his head like, hey, how you doing?
01:22:37.980So on the substance, it wasn't necessarily all that accurate.
01:22:41.280But like, as dudes, that's who they are.
01:22:43.640Because you can also hear, see in the back of Gore's ear, like somebody named Naomi told him, you need to walk around like a confident animal on stage.
01:24:17.500She did interject herself and try to, quote, fact check Mitt Romney, who is claiming that Barack Obama had yet to call the Benghazi terrorist attack a terrorist attack.
01:25:59.460If you sit there and it's an amen chorus, who wants to watch that?
01:26:03.480That's why these things can be really boring.
01:26:05.880But when it's a presidential debate, you want to get, you know, up against every candidate and get the best answers out because your job is not to obviously be an advocate.
01:26:14.960And I've said this at the beginning of the podcast.
01:26:17.040Your job is to entertain and inform the American people.
01:26:20.820And the American people want adversarial questions to both of the people that might run the country.
01:26:25.540Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
01:26:27.600And they get in the simple answer is, after so many years of this, journalism is a political game and there are political actors in it.
01:26:36.860And unfortunately, it's become sort of more serious these days than it was when Brent Bozell was complaining about it in the 1980s.
01:26:46.740What's going to happen with respect to January 6th and the convictions?
01:26:52.760Both topics are guaranteed to come up.
01:26:55.300So January 6th, particularly the pardons, we know that because Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, who's a CNN contributor, is saying those are going to be the two most tricky issues for Trump.
01:27:05.760There's no question she's been consulting with them, in my mind, behind the scenes about how to do this and where to go.
01:27:15.340So if you were advising Trump on, in particular, January 6th, I know the Republican MAGA base wants to hear, yeah, pardon political prisoners.
01:27:25.600And Trump has said that at his rallies.
01:27:27.040But this is a very, very different audience that feels very differently about January 6th.
01:27:33.660I mean, Trump is is so used to kind of having particular lines.
01:27:39.960I think it would actually be challenging and incredibly surprising for me to not hear him refer to them as kind of victims of political persecution.
01:27:50.440I don't even know that it's out of a sense of kind of loyalty.
01:27:53.260I suspect it's just a matter of habit.
01:27:55.060I think he'll probably try to be careful and thread the needle.
01:27:58.800But I also just cannot imagine a well-rehearsed response to this that has him doing what politicians have traditionally done in the general, which is tack to the middle completely and try and try to make certain you're scooping up those middle of the road people rather than catering to your base's interests.
01:28:17.360That said, with respect to the criminal prosecutions, you know, my mother is actually my bellwether for this sort of thing.
01:28:22.460She's not a very sophisticated political analyst.
01:28:25.060And there are, in fact, plenty of interesting stories I could tell that would make that very clear.
01:28:28.920And she is a kind of conventional born Democrat who refuses to even consider Republicans.
01:28:36.220But when she talks about the criminal prosecutions with respect to Trump, she regards them as generally unfair.
01:28:43.620And she doesn't know the specifics, but that is the conclusion that she's reached.
01:28:47.940And I don't think she's alone in that.
01:28:49.960So I suspect there'll probably be a little bit more grace for that than there might be with respect to J.
01:28:58.600And I think that this is a pretty straightforward one is rather than, you know, responding from the gut, which is what he does in so many of the rallies is that we've talked about this endlessly on our show is that I personally think many of these people should be prosecuted.
01:29:15.860Some of them should go to jail, not all of them, but that the jail terms seem wildly outsized to me.
01:29:22.720And so what I would do if I were Donald Trump is say, look, this was a bad day.