On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump will debate Vice President Kamala Harris in their first direct encounter of the 2024 presidential election. Looking back at Trump’s three debates with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, expect the press to adore Harris’s performance, while deriding Trump as someone out of a “third world” “banana republic.”
The media tone was established early, just minutes before the candidates met in their first (September 26, 2016) debate, as CNN’s Van Jones extolled Hillary’s supreme abilities. “She is the Michael Jordan of policy in multiple, multiple areas,” Jones crowed. “She’s like the valedictorian running against this crazy frat boy.”
With NBC’s Lester Holt asking the questions, Hillary escaped scrutiny on her health (just days earlier, she’d collapsed at a 9/11 ceremony), foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, and her role in the debacle that led to the murder of a U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, Libya while she was Secretary of State.
“I thought it was a shutout for Hillary,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews cheered during his network’s post-debate coverage. “She cleaned his clock tonight. It was a bit embarrassing for Trump. I thought a bit that I was watching A Few Good Men and she was Tom Cruise and he was Jack Nicholson. It was not close. It was over tonight. Very clear result: Hillary won big time. It was a shutout.”
“I think that Hillary’s composure and her mastery of the detail was consistent throughout, and she was pleasant throughout,” assessed NBC’s Tom Brokaw, as he faulted Trump for resorting to “bombast.”
Over on ABC, Cokie Roberts scolded the Republican nominee: “His facial expressions throughout were condescending and in ways just rude, and early in the debate he was also bullying, so, I think there are a variety of things here that did not work for him.”
“This was the worst debate performance I have ever seen,” concluded the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman on MSNBC. “In every respect, it was awful. Hillary wiped the floor with him in this debate.”
The front page of the next morning’s New York Times featured a one-sided “news analysis” trashing Trump’s “hurricane of factual distortion, taunting interruptions and blustery generalities.”
“Mrs. Clinton’s challenge was evident from the moment she walked onto the stage at Hofstra University on Long Island,” political reporters Michael Barbaro and Matt Flegenheimer wrote. “How much respect should she show to a rival of unparalleled incivility, who misrepresents the truth with abandon, crassly rates women’s looks on a scale of 1 to 10 and casually denigrates entire ethnic groups — a man whose words Mrs. Clinton has described as racist, xenophobic and misogynistic?”
“To call Trump a con man, as many have, is a disservice to the art of the con,” ex-CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote on Facebook the day after the debate. “By its definition a con requires deceit. But Trump has not tried to hide his lies or the sheer unrealistic audacity of his cartoonish policy positions.”
Thirteen days later (October 9), the pair met again for their second debate. The reviews sounded as if they could have been lifted from coverage of the first debate. “I just hope to God I don’t see another campaign like this one. America can do better than what we have seen here tonight. This was just disgraceful,” CBS’s Bob Schieffer grumped when it was over. “This was WrestleMania, this wasn’t about presidential politics.”
“I can’t even recall a debate ever in the American history with that much venom between the two,” fretted NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
In an indication of just how far the media goalposts have shifted in eight years, journalists in 2016 found it completely objectionable that Trump floated the idea that Hillary belonged “in jail” for her mishandling of classified e-mails as Secretary of State.
“Not to sound too corny, but what makes this country different from countries with dictators in Africa, or Stalin or Hitler, or any of those countries with dictators and totalitarian leaders, is that when they took over, they put their opponents in jail. To hear one presidential candidate, say — even if it was a flip comment, which it was — ‘you’re going to be in jail’ to another presidential candidate on the debate stage in the United States of America, stunning, just stunning,” griped CNN’s Dana Bash.
“This is the kind of thing that they do in countries not like the United States, where you lock up and jail your political opponents,” CNN’s Jake Tapper agreed.
“I mean this is what they do in banana republics,” groused Schieffer on CBS.
Prior to the debate, Trump appeared with several women — Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey — who had been victimized by Bill Clinton before and during his presidency. The media didn’t like that, either.
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson wrote in The Guardian that Trump’s appearance with the women “resembled a Soviet show trial,” while the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan sneered the look of Trump sitting at a long table with the women “looked like a twisted version of ‘The Last Supper.’...Bringing the accusers into a presidential-debate town hall was nothing but hate-theater: a counterpunch to deflect criticism of Trump’s own shameful history with women.”
“Only in a third world country, and only in the, sort of, the mind of some sort of movie writer of a third world democracy or dictatorship would you have a candidate publicly humiliate a former occupant of that office by parading all of these other people around,” NBC’s Chuck Todd blasted on MSNBC Live the next day.
While the media derided Trump, there was yet more predictable praise for Hillary. “Everything about her was presidential tonight. Her poise, her speech delivery was confident, mellifluous, even. She has a beautiful voice,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews proclaimed. “She was very winning. She had winning personality again.”
Ten days later (October 19), Clinton and Trump met for the final time. “This is a very sad night for the country. You can’t polish this turd,” CNN’s Van Jones mourned as he slammed Donald Trump’s performance.
MSNBC’s coverage included the vehemently anti-Trump one-time Republican operative Steve Schmidt, who derided Trump as “incoherent....He was like an old man in the park feeding squirrels.”
“There just wasn’t a moment that I saw in this debate where Donald Trump had an advantage over Hillary Clinton,” extolled The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell. “It was nothing but a romp by Hillary Clinton all the way through here.”
“I’ve heard from Republicans tonight who also thought it was her best performance,” raved Nicolle Wallace.
Over on ABC, political analyst Matthew Dowd agreed, arguing that Clinton’s strong showing meant that a Democratic victory was now all-but-assured: “This debate was a clear win for Hillary Clinton. She has the lead. She is actually in the process of running out the clock and unless some unknown event occurs, Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president of the United States.”
Oops.
The forthcoming Trump-Harris debate may or may not be a “shitshow,” as an irate media slammed the 2020 Trump-Biden debate. But it already seems a foregone conclusion that they’re going to declare Kamala Harris the winner, and blame Trump for any incivility that erupts.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
