I want a name when I lose

While Trump tried to claim in the spin room last night that ACTUALLY he won the debate, having seen that this wasn’t going to fly among anybody who isn’t cashing a paycheck from Ben Shapiro or Peter Thiel he’s blaming the moderators:

By Wednesday morning, former President Donald J. Trump had settled on a clear message about his defensive and scowling performance in the ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris:

I’m not the loser. ABC is the loser.

“I thought it was terrible from the standpoint of ABC,” Mr. Trump said in a live interview on “Fox & Friends,” during which he assailed the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he deemed a biased approach. “They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization.”

Mr. Trump said that ABC “lost a lot of credibility,” “took a big hit” and “should be embarrassed” because Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis fact-checked several of his answers, while, in his view, giving Ms. Harris a pass. He mused that the network ought to lose its broadcasting license.

Hmm a major party candidate threatening to revoke a network’s broadcast license — seems like it’s time for a new round of the TWITTER FILES!

It’s worth noting here exactly what Trump is so upset about:

Here are the fact-checks that Trumpers are mad about today:

— Moms are not murdering their babies
— Migrants aren’t eating your pets
— Biden won the 2020 election— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2024

The fact that the mild pushback offered to these lies tok Trump by surprise underscores what an abysmal job Tapper and Bash did at the first debate. It’s also worth noting that the ABC moderators — whose questions were much better than the CNN debate — allowed Trump a bonus rebuttal after virtually every question while never allowing Harris to respond. (This was probably a net positive for Harris but still an annoying way to run a debate.)

The Fox and Friends dopes expected this to be prelude to Trump asking for a debate on Fox, but alas they were not supine enough for his liking:

For the “Fox & Friends” team, the moment seemed ripe to secure a commitment from Mr. Trump to participate in a debate on their own network, a goal that Fox News has pursued for months. The anchor Steve Doocy raised the notion of a Fox debate moderated by the network’s lead political anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

But it turned out Mr. Trump wasn’t thrilled about that idea, either.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to have Martha and Bret; I would love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret,” Mr. Trump said, before ticking off his preferred alternatives, including the Fox pundits Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters. “Let’s give other people a shot,” he said.

It became apparent that Mr. Trump had taken time overnight to closely review Fox News’s post-debate coverage. “I didn’t think Martha and Bret were good last night,” he said. “I thought Jesse was fantastic.” He said that he found Harold Ford Jr., another Fox News analyst, “just as dishonest as ABC.”

Harold Ford — now that is not a name I have heard in a long time. A long time. His becoming a Fox News “liberal” was over-over-over-determined but remember when he thought that he could helicopter into New York and muscle Kirsten Gillibrand out a Senate seat? Good times.

Anyway “I will only do a debate moderated by Watters, Hannity, Gutfeld!, and they guy who did DeSantis’s Nazi ads” is another way of saying there won’t be another debate, which shows that Trump’s disconnection from reality has not quite reached 100%.