"Delusional and unsettling": Trump forgets there was no debate audience, claims crowd "went crazy"
Former President Donald Trump appeared on a taped segment of Fox News' "Gutfeld!" Wednesday, complaining once again that the ABC News debate moderators bothered to fact-check him while falsely claiming that the debate audience "went crazy" for his performance. Host Greg Gutfeld chose not to fact-check Trump over the fact that there was no debate audience whatsoever, per the rules set by ABC News and agreed to by both campaigns.
"They didn’t correct her once,” Trump complained, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. “And they corrected me, everything I said, practically. I think nine times or 11 times. And the audience was absolutely — they went crazy.”
MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes argued that the Republican candidate's remark validated concerns about his age and mental capacity.
"Trump talking about 'the audience' at the debate (where there famously was no audience) is more delusional and unsettling than any moment of Joe Biden misspeaking all year and it’s not close," Hayes wrote on social media.
As for Trump's complaint about fact checking: The discrepancy between him and the vice president corresponds to the number of falsehoods each candidate told. An analysis by CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale found that Trump made "at least 33 false claims," including falsehoods about Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets, while Harris made "at least one."
“Frankly, I don’t have enough time here to run through each specific Trump false claim. I urge people to go to our CNN website or our app to read our team’s detailed fact checks on this and a whole bunch more," he said. The one falsehood he highlighted for Harris was her claim that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression"; the unemployment rate in January 2021, while high by modern standards, was the worst to begin a presidential term in the last 20 years, not since the 1930s.
That has not stopped conservative pundits from characterizing ABC's fact-checking as overzealous and unfair to Trump, who claims he had "great debate" despite viewers and pundits largely agreeing that it was "disastrous."
"You got a lot of people watching, we had 75 million people watching, something like that. You have to do well, you can't do badly," Trump said, adding that he wondered if the Democrats would swap Harris out of the ticket if she performs badly. The latter comment earned Trump some laughter and applause from the now-real audience.
On the day of the taping, Trump was in New York for a rally in which he suggested that he would win the state which he lost by more than 20 points in 2016 and 2020, unless Haitian migrants kill him first.