Chris Wallace had a rough night Tuesday. Unable to control Donald Trump during a horror show of a presidential debate, he at one point completely gave up trying. “I’m gonna ask a question about race,” a flustered Wallace told the president at one point. “But if you want to answer about something else, go ahead.” If his interview with Trump over the summer demonstrated how to hold his feet to the fire, his performance as moderator was a condensed version of how the media has normalized this man over the last five years and allowed him to rewrite the rules to his liking. If Trump gained anything from his first clash with Joe Biden—and it’s hard to believe he did—he has Wallace’s nonpresence to thank for it.
Even as his “invisibility” gave Trump a leg up, the right immediately began to scapegoat Wallace for the president’s revolting act of self-sabotage. Trump’s failure surely wasn’t his own fault—at Fox News, it was their own colleague who was to blame.
“Trump is debating the moderator and Biden,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted. “The questions were mostly asked from a left perspective,” Fox’s Mark Levin said after the debate, adding that “Biden went unchallenged by the moderator far too often.” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade joined the pile-on, too, complaining on Twitter that Biden was being “allowed to interrupt” while Trump was not and, in a deleted post, echoed Ingraham’s take that Wallace and Biden were ganging up on the president. Kilmeade was still whining about how “rude” Biden had been on his program Wednesday morning, though he did offer up some rare criticism of the president.
“Donald Trump ruined the biggest layup in the history of debates by not condemning white supremacists,” Kilmeade said, referring to the evening’s defining exchange in which the president declined to denounce the hate groups and violent militias who support him and instead told them to “stand by.” “Why the president didn’t just knock it out of the park, I’m not sure.”
One can probably think of a couple reasons, of course. But they didn’t matter to many of Kilmeade’s colleagues, who excused or overlooked the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacists and, the case of Sean Hannity, cast his childish pouting and cartoonish bullying as the behavior of a “gladiator warrior fighter.”
Venture even a little bit outside of Fox, though, and even some Republicans found Trump’s behavior to be off-putting. Trump stooge Rick Santorum gently conceded on CNN that his candidate “overplayed his hand” during the debate. “The president got hurt tonight,” Santorum said. Trump ally Chris Christie, who helped the president prepare for the debate, acknowledged on ABC News that the Republican ran “too hot” Tuesday night.