The
pundits and
Republican establishment are all over the map on who won Thursday night's presidential primary debate. According to some, Donald Trump did fine; according to others, he was the night's clear loser. We won't know what voters thought until we see how it shakes out in the polls, but one thing was clear: Fox News was looking to take Trump out.
Trump, predictably, didn't like the way he was treated, saying "The questions to me were far tougher, and that I — supposedly, according to what everyone’s telling me, I won the debate [...] But the questions to me were not nice." Trump doesn't think it's fair any time everyone doesn't completely cater to his ego. But in this case, he's not wrong. From the first minute of the debate, Trump did face more aggressive questioning than the other candidates. While Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace, and Bret Baier had tough questions for most of the candidates, they directed questions at Trump that sounded more like an opposition research team than debate moderators. As Ed Kilgore writes,
Fox News’ purpose in the main 10-candidate event was made plain with the first question: an in-your-face spotlight on Donald Trump’s refusal to promise not to run as an independent candidate. And the relentless pounding of Trump—on his bankruptcies, his past support for single-payer health care and abortion rights, his “specific evidence” for claiming Mexico has dispatched criminals to the U.S. (slurs about immigrants by other candidates didn’t come up) and even his sexist tweets-—continued right on through to Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group, designed to show how much damage Trump had sustained. It was by far the least impartial showing by debate sponsors I have seen, up to and including the disgraceful ABC-moderated 2008 Democratic event that involved a deliberate trashing of all the candidates.
Shoot,
even Lindsey Graham thinks "This was more of an inquisition than it was a debate." Trump seemed to parry a number of the questions effectively, but did the barrage have the overall impact Fox News was seeking? Will Trump's supporters stick with him, rally to him more strongly, or seep away?