Chris Wallace was always going to be a terrible choice as a moderator for any of the three presidential debates, let alone the first one, but good God, did he fulfill that destiny with flying colors.
We knew it back in July when Wallace attempted to fact-check President Trump on the accurate claim that former Vice President Joe Biden was on the record committing to defunding police departments. Biden is, in fact, on record committing to that, and yet, Wallace pretended we hadn’t heard it with our own ears.
The Fox News anchor was supposed to show up and moderate a debate, with it having expressly been stated that he wouldn’t operate as a fact-checker, and yet, that’s all he did for at least the first hour of the debate. It got so bad that, at one point, he asked Trump not to interrupt his opponent (there were many fine interruptions on both sides), and when the president asked Wallace to make that same point to Biden, Wallace puffed up his chest to tell Trump that it was actually him doing more interrupting.
That exchange lasted a fully wasted 10 seconds so that Wallace could make a niggling point that viewers didn’t care about and that was explicitly untrue.
Even if you could prove that the president was the champion of interrupting every person on Earth, let’s talk about what Biden did: He told the president of the United States during a nationally televised debate to “shut up,” to “keep yapping,” and he called Trump a “clown.”
All of that actually happened, and not once did Wallace reprimand the former vice president. He might have perhaps even asked that Biden keep things civil, given that, you know, Biden’s whole thing is “restoring the soul of America.”
Who knew that restoring the country’s soul worked hand in hand with calling the president a “clown” and telling him to his face to “shut up”?
