For GOP front-runner Donald Trump, the lengthy three-hour political debate that CNN held Wednesday was way too long.
“Three hours is too much for a debate,” Trump, who leads the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Now, it’s a long time to be debating but I think it’s even worse for people that have to sit at home. If this were a two hour debate it would have been a great debate. Three hours is really unacceptable.”
The debate, hosted by CNN, was originally supposed to last two hours and begin at 9 p.m. ET. But a week before the event, the network added another hour, moving the start time to 8.
“What happened is about a week ago we got a call that they were going to make the debate almost an hour more,” Trump said. You know what that is. That means the advertising is so dense and so deep and they’re getting tremendous numbers per minute and per half minute that they just added another 45 minutes to an hour to the end. That had nothing to do with anything else. So, I think that was a shame because three hours is too much for a debate. How long is ‘Gone with the Wind’? Three hours and 20 minutes.”
Even before the debate, Trump had complained about the length. “Will be heading over to the debate soon,” he wrote on Twitter just a few hours before the debate started on Wednesday. “Can you believe CNN is ‘milking’ it for almost 3 hours? Too long, too many people on stage!”
Others shared Trump’s sentiment. A report in Politico called it the “three-hour debate from hell.”
According to the report, CNN President Jeff Zucker defended the length. “It’s exactly how long we wanted it to be and covered all the issues we wanted it to get to,” he said.
