Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Wednesday the presidential debate was so clearly rigged it ultimately helped Donald Trump and hurt Kamala Harris.
“The dishonesty and bias of the moderators set new records for a network trying to rig a debate,” Gingrich wrote. “The big loser from Tuesday’s Presidential Debate was ABC News.”
Virtually everyone recognized what ABC was up to and in the end, it helped the former president and hurt Harris, he observed.
In his essay, Gingrich laid particular emphasis on the obviously biased fact-checking, which was not only tendentious but outright false at times.
“The so-called fact checking was atrocious,” he wrote, citing as an example the moderators’ assertion that President Trump’s concern about babies being allowed to die after birth was wrong.
At least eight babies “have been allowed to die in Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz after attempted abortions,” Gingrich noted. “The ABC fact check was simply a lie.”
Vice President Harris was “clearly better prepared” than most Republicans expected, Gingrich observed, though in some cases, her answers were so clearly memorized it gave “the impression that she might have seen the questions in advance.”
For his part, President Trump “found himself in a three-on-one debate in which the two ABC moderators were clearly pro-Harris in the topics they chose and the one-sided and inaccurate fact checking,” he said.
And yet despite that disadvantage, Trump avoided blowing up in the way Democrats were hoping, and “he delivered every major policy message defining Harris as an incompetent radical,” he added.
People’s reactions to and evaluation of the debate underscores the “enormous gap” between the elites who hail Vice President Harris the winner and the American people “who think the debate was rigged and that President Trump won despite everything,” he stated.
Gingrich cited an ongoing C-SPAN survey on X that showed “75 percent thought Trump won the debate, while only 25 percent thought Harris had won.”
At the time of the writing, there were 195,000 votes and 13 hours left on the poll. Now that the survey has ended, 73.9 percent of the total of 313,916 participants said Trump won, while just 26.1 percent thought Harris had won.
In the end, despite the rigged three-on-one debate, with biased moderators lying about facts and teeing up questions favorable to Harris, “her radical record and performance failures on the economy and the border also got through,” Gingrich wrote.
“My guess is that President Trump will start pulling away in the battleground states,” he said. “The truth will sink in despite the media’s effort to get Harris elected.”