Your support helps us to tell the story
After his widely panned performance at his first and potentially final debate against Kamala Harris, Donald Trump demanded that the news network that hosted the matchup have its “license” revoked.
Trump, still fuming just hours after Tuesday’s late-night debate, called into Fox News to blame the ABC News moderators and the network and suggested he won’t want to do another debate at all.
“To be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” he told Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning, referencing moderators’ real-time fact checks of several false claims, including conspiracy theories about immigrants stealing and eating pets and “after birth” abortions.
“It was three-to-one. It was a rigged deal,” he said.
Hours later, in an email through his campaign’s primary fundraising arm, he wrote “I love ABC News.”
“I don’t know that I want to do another debate,” he told Fox & Friends. “I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night, we won the debate, we had a terrible, terrible network … They should be embarrassed.”
He claimed he won the debate “92 to seven” and that it was “maybe my best debate.”
Trump also suggested that he believed Harris was being fed her answers.
“Kamala doesn’t do any shows. … That’s not fair to the public because they don’t know what they’re getting. But they saw last night what they had. They had a rigged show with somebody who maybe even had the answers,” he said.
“I watched her talk, and I said, ‘you know, she seems awfully familiar with the questions,’ and you get pretty good at that stuff after a while, but when I saw how totally rigged that was, I take a look at it and I watch, and I say, ‘You know, you have to get out there,’ and one of the things I did was I said, ‘Let’s do this show at’ — what time is it — ‘6:30 in the morning,’ and it’s an honor to do it, but you have to go out and you have to do the shows, you have to go out and do media.”
Trump has repeatedly publicly threatened to somehow revoke broadcast licenses of news organizations that aired or published critical coverage as he wages his crusade against the media.
“With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” he wrote in 2018, in response to a story about his push to increase the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
In September of last year, he suggested that Comcast — the parent company of NBC and MSNBC — should be investigated for “Country Threatening Treason” because of its coverage of Russian interference in his 2016 campaign. One month later, he publicly questioned why CBS News should “get free public airwaves” after it broadcast an interview with President Joe Biden.
“MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” he wrote the following month.
“Our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!” he added.
Trump — who lashed out at journalists as “fake news” and “enemy of the people” more than 2,000 times in his presidency — has also demanded that journalists should be thrown in jail for not revealing their sources, and has reportedly privately weighed using federal law enforcement to investigate publishers.
In the Trump-allied Project 2025 plans for the next Republican president’s administration, the authors write that public broadcasting outlets like PBS and NPR are designed to suppress conservative views and should be defunded, and that an administration should re-evaluate its relationship with the media, including potentially dissolving the White House press corps.
Trump has also filed lawsuits against The New York Times and CNN in apparent attempts to gut long-standing Supreme Court precedent that limits the ability of public officials to sue for defamation.
