From Chris Wallace’s slides to Megyn Kelly’s flip-flop videos, Fox News was well-armed to take on Donald Trump on Thursday night.
This time, he wouldn’t get away with vagaries about cutting waste and abuse.
This time, he wouldn’t wriggle out of past contradictions like shedding past skins.
And on a day when the GOP frontrunner spent much of his time beating back attacks from leaders of his own party’s establishment, starting with 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, he finally seemed to succumb to the Fox News moderators.
“Your numbers don’t add up, sir,” Wallace said, after Trump went into a standard response about how he would cut waste and abuse from the Education Department and EPA to cover his tax plans. And the Fox News anchor quickly produced a graphic showing that cutting all of both agencies would barely trim the deficit, let alone pay for huge new tax cuts.
Trump then quickly pivoted to another talking point – how the government loses money by not being able to negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies. But Fox had clearly anticipated Trump’s move, and before Trump could even finish, Wallace pulled up another equation.
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The POLITICO Wrongometer
“Let’s put up full screen number two,” Wallace said.
“You say that medicare could save $300 billion a year negotiating lower drug prices. But Medicare total only spends $78 billion a year on drugs. Sir, that’s the facts.”
Then came the highly anticipated return engagement between Trump and Kelly, the anchor he repeatedly scorned for having taken him on in Fox’s first debate last summer by highlighting his comments about women over the years. Trump avoided confronting Kelly in January by skipping that month’s Fox News debate entirely.
This time, Trump refrained from personally attacking Kelly, but the rematch was more of a throwdown as Kelly seemed to dare Trump to go after her as she launched some of the toughest questions of the night his way.
“Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is they believe you tell it like it is. Time and time again in this campaign, you’ve actually told the voters one thing only to reverse yourself within weeks or even sometimes days,” Kelly said as she teed up three video clips of Trump changing his position on Afghanistan, Syrian refugees and whether George W. Bush lied about Iraq.
“How is any of this telling it like it is?” Kelly asked.
“You change your tune on so many things, and that has some people saying, what is his core?” she added.
Trump admitted he had changed his position. “You’re right,” he said, and then went on a riff about how all leaders need to have a certain degree of flexibility in order to make things work.
For many of those watching, it was as though Fox took on the job of taking Trump to task that none of the other candidates had managed to do successfully.
“Megyn Kelly is doing better vs Trump than any of the candidates,” Time Magazine’s Zeke Miller tweeted.
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“One of the winners this year has been @megynkelly. She asks good, tough questions. I wish she had the chance to grill Democrats, too,” New York Times columnist Nick Kristof tweeted.
“Fox News does these debates very, very well,” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote.
The moderators weren’t nearly as persistent with the other candidates (they had use the old video clips move on Cruz and Rubio in previous debates) – a decision that seems justified by Trump’s standing as the likeliest nominee.
“I think we certainly take note of who are the candidates that seem to have a better chance of nomination as opposed to those who don’t,” Wallace said in an interview earlier this week explaining why certain candidates would get more questions than others. “I think we went out of our way early on in the process to treat everyone as much the same as possible, but to be certain people at the center of stage will get more questions and will get more response to attacks.”
In addition to Wallace’s number crunching and Kelly’s flip-flop videos, the moderators also highlighted quotes from a court decision involving Trump University and showed an odd John Kasich campaign ad that questioned whether Trump and Vladimir Putin would team up to “make tyranny great again.”
“I’m not biting,” Kasich said, avoiding an attack on Trump which would invite a response.
But the hard hitting questions stopped for a while after Wallace, Kelly and the third moderator, Bret Baier, left the stage and the cameras turned to Bill O’Reilly for the immediate post game interview with Trump.
“Are you going to be mad at guys like me when I ask the negative questions?”
“I think you’ve become very negative,” Trump said.
“Who me?” O’Reilly said, sounding surprised. “Why would I do that?”
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“I don’t know that. You have to ask your psychiatrist,” Trump responded. “You get a little carried away.”
Trump tried to shift the focus to his wife and son, standing next to him, but O’Reilly wanted more, telling Trump he thinks he’s been “very fair” before asking if Trump wanted to give him an example of a time where he hadn’t been fair.
“No,” Trump said.
But soon Kelly was back on camera, showing why Fox News had another good night.
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