Presidential debates have often been compared to professional wrestling matches, but the ABC News debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris more closely resembled a handicap match, with Trump taking on three opponents at once: Harris and both moderators.
As “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir and ABC News Live “Prime” anchor Linsey Davis regularly fact-checked Trump in real time, they allowed Harris to get by with numerous evasions and false statements on such issues as late-term abortions, post-birth executions, government pregnancy monitors, the economy, and haggard canards about “very fine people” at Charlottesville.
Here are a few of Harris’ misstatements that the ABC News moderators let her get away with.
1. Late-Term Abortion Is a Myth?
Harris attempted to deny Trump’s charge that the Democratic Party supports late-term abortion by denying such abortions take place. “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” Harris dodged.
In reality, 21 states allow abortion until birth: Six states have no legal limit protecting unborn children, and the rest allow abortion after the point of viability thanks to a vague and expansive “health of the mother” exception.
Late-term abortions are well-documented. In 2022, pro-life advocates found the remains of five babies whom abortionist Cesare Santangelo aborted late in their term or possibly after birth at the Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, D.C. The Biden-Harris Justice Department advised the District of Columbia to destroy the evidence.
“In 2013, New Mexico abortionist Shelley Sella faced medical board sanctions after she committed an abortion on a child at 35 weeks,” reports Carole Novielli of Live Action. “In 2003, abortionist Charles Rossmann gave abortion pills to a woman who was past 30 weeks.” Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque’s website advertised that “abortion services are available through 32 weeks. Exceptions after 32 weeks are provided on a case-by-case basis.”
A 1981 Philadelphia Inquirer article documented that, in abortion facilities, “unintended live births are literally an everyday occurrence,” but they are “hushed up” instead of treated as “a problem to be solved.”
More than 56,000 abortions took place after 21 weeks, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
2. Abortions After Birth Don’t Happen?
The issue of infanticide cropped up during the debate, as Trump cited comments made by a former Virginia governor about allowing babies born alive during birth to die—a position Trump called “execution after birth.” Davis responded to Trump’s comments on abortion by saying, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
It is true that during a 2019 interview, then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, said, if a baby is born alive during a botched abortion, “I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother” about the child’s future.
His comment was not an outlier. In 2013, a lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, Alisa Lapolt Snow, testified before the Florida House of Representatives that even if a baby is alive, breathing on a table, and moving, “We believe that any decision that’s made” about administering treatment to the newborn “should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician. … That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider.”
Whistleblowers have noted abortionists regularly allowed children to be born alive, then die by neglect. Jill Stanek, who served as a nurse at Christ Hospital in the Chicago area, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020:
In the event a baby was aborted alive, he or she received no medical assessments or care but was only given what my hospital called ‘comfort care’—made comfortable, as Governor Northam indicated. One night, a nursing co-worker was transporting a baby who had been aborted because he had Down syndrome to our Soiled Utility Room to die—because that’s where survivors were taken. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone, so I rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound, and was about the size of my hand.
Some accounts are more gruesome. Multiple employees accused “Texas Gosnell” abortionist Douglas Karpen of twisting the heads off live babies after birth.
Yet the Democratic ticket has not lifted a finger to require infant lives be saved. In 2019, then-Sen. Harris voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which requires abortionists to provide potentially lifesaving care to babies born during botched abortions. There is no federal requirement to provide medical care to an infant born during an abortion. As governor of Minnesota, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz signed a bill that removed a requirement that abortionists “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.”
Although only eight states currently require that the data be reported, official statistics show 277 babies were born alive during abortions. Pro-life advocates Gianna Jessen and Melissa Ohden survived botched abortions.
Only eight states require abortionists to report infants born alive during a botched abortion (Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas.). Two states—Walz’s Minnesota and Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan—repealed those requirements. Abortionists are not known as for being conscientious about reporting their own botched abortions.
Numerous Democratic lawmakers have introduced bills to legalize “perinatal death,” which an official analysis confirmed would bring about the “unintended” legalization of infanticide.
Summing up the evidence, Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch said that the Democratic Party’s “attack on life begins at fertilization, but it continues throughout the entirety of pregnancy and does not even stop after the baby is born. Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz have actively worked to ensure that babies born alive following abortions do not receive the help that they desperately need.”
3. Pro-Life Protections Prevent Miscarriage Care?
Harris repeated the lie that state pro-life protections prevent doctors from treating women suffering from miscarriages. Harris said she had spoken to women “being denied care in an emergency room, because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail.”
No pro-life law in the nation prohibits doctors from caring for miscarriages. Even Project 2025, which Harris repeatedly invoked as extreme, states, “Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.” Pro-life advocates blame confusion created by the abortion industry with causing doctors to deny women treatment. To help women’s health, the abortion industry should stop promoting that lie, they say.
4. Donald Trump Would Have the Government Monitor Pregnancies and Miscarriages?
Harris asserted that Trump would preside over the installation of a Big Brother-style surveillance of every pregnancy in America. “In his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion—a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” Harris said, without any moderator’s intervention.
This statement had been repeated at the Democratic National Convention, and the Harris-Walz campaign has claimed in TV spots that Trump has endorsed “requiring the government to monitor women’s pregnancies.”
But Project 2025—which is not Trump’s platform—contains no such provision. Presumably, Harris is wrenching out of context its reasonable proposal that states report abortion statistics accurately. The Biden administration’s most recent annual report on abortion—known as the Abortion Surveillance—excludes statistics from four states including the most populous state: California, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
Project 2025 calls on the federal government “to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” The government would “ensure that [state] statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.” That’s a far cry from a “government monitor” peeping in on women’s ultrasounds.
Even legacy media fact-checkers have denied this claim. FactCheck.org noted curtly, “Trump has not made such a proposal.” Reuters reported, “Fact Check: Project 2025 did not propose a ‘period passport’ for women.” Harris’ allegation “significantly overstates the nature of the monitoring called for in Project 2025,” reports USA Today.
5. National Abortion Ban?
“If Donald Trump were to be reelected, he will sign a national abortion ban,” claimed Harris. Trump removed the Republican Party platform’s historic commitment to passing a Human Life Amendment, aspirational as it was, and has repeatedly said he opposes any further national legislation on the issue. “It’s the vote of the people now,” Trump said at the debate.
6. Trump Called for a ‘Bloodbath’?
In one of the more egregious statements allowed to slip into public consciousness without any pushback, Harris falsely asserted that “Donald Trump the candidate has said in this election there will be a bloodbath, if the outcome of this election is not to his liking.”
Trump used the economic term “bloodbath” while contrasting his tariff policy with the Biden-Harris administration’s pro-China electric vehicle policy during a March rally near Dayton, Ohio. “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole” industry, he said. As this author noted at The Washington Stand:
The term ‘bloodbath’ is regularly used in the financial sector to describe an industrial contraction. The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists one of the definitions of ‘bloodbath’ as ‘a major economic disaster.’ … Democratic campaign operatives pounced on Trump’s use of the term ‘bloodbath’ to insinuate he wanted to foment a blood-drenched revolution if he lost the election. … The [then-]Biden campaign promptly wrenched the president’s remarks out of context to create a digital campaign ad titled ‘Bloodbath,’ which recycles other erroneous statements, such as falsely claiming Trump praised rioters at the Charlottesville and Jan. 6 D.C. riots.
ABC News moderators let the Democrat’s baseless allegation of revolutionary violence go unchecked.
7. Are Americans Better Off Today Than They Were 4 Years Ago?
Muir opened the debate by asking Harris, “Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”
Harris responded, “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid,” and spoke for two minutes about her economic plans, ignoring the question completely. Unlike numerous questions in which the moderators demanded an answer of Trump, Muir asked no follow-up of Harris.
Harris boasts of being the tie-breaking votes for the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, which economists credit with setting off historically high inflation rates that exceeded 9%. The cost of a gallon of gasoline more than doubled during the Biden-Harris administration and is still $1.29 higher than the day Trump left office. Staples such as groceries have risen nearly 20%, and new houses have more than doubled on her watch.
8. Project 2025 Is Trump’s Plan?
Harris continually attempted to tie Trump to Project 2025, a project of The Heritage Foundation, which the former president has repeatedly disparaged.
Trump replied, “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” referring to its commonsense conservative proposals as “out there.”
“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it,” he added.
The plan’s authors have acknowledged Trump had nothing to do with their conservative vision for the next four years. “Project 2025 is not affiliated with any candidate, and no candidate was involved with the drafting of the Mandate for Leadership, which was published by Heritage in April 2023,” Noah Weinrich, a spokesperson for Project 2025, told CNN.
9. Trump Praised Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists?
Harris repeated misinformation that, as president, Trump praised neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. “Let’s remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing antisemitic hate, and what did the president then at the time say? There were ‘fine people’ on each side,” Harris claimed.
In reality, Trump said, “You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” But Trump promptly stated, “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. … There were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. … They had some rough, bad people—neo-Nazis, white nationalists.”
“You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name,” because of Lee’s role as military leader of the Confederacy. But many Founding Fathers were also slaveowners. “Are we gonna take down statues of George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?” he asked. “You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.”
Trump also pointed out the presence of Antifa protesters there to cheer on the tearing down of America’s historical monuments, who—unlike those opposed to tearing down U.S. history, did not have a permit to meet. “Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits, and with the helmets, and the baseball bats. You got a lot of bad people in the other group, too.”
Even Snopes.com ran an article titled, “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’”
10. Trump Is Above the Law?
Harris attempted to raise fears that Trump would break the law with impunity in a second term. “The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the former president would essentially be immune from any misconduct if he were to enter the White House again,” said Harris, while claiming Trump would weaponize government against his political enemies in a second term.
“The [p]resident enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the [p]resident does is official,” stated the court ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. “The [p]resident is not above the law.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
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