MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
After weeks of intense speculation and anticipation, we now know the outcome of what may be the only presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris before voters cast their ballots. They met on a stage in Philadelphia last night and spent much of their time jabbing at each other.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let's be clear about that. And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that.
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DONALD TRUMP: She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success - we'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
KELLY: NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro and media correspondent David Folkenflik watched all of the back-and-forth. They are with me now. Hi Domenico. Hi, David.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, great to be with you.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Hey. OK, so now that y'all have had a chance to sleep on it - Domenico, you first - what was your major takeaway from last night's debate?
MONTANARO: I've slept on it, and my takeaway has not changed. The debate was not really close. I mean, arguably, this was the best handling of Trump by any candidate that's debated him in what Kamala Harris was able to do. You know, she baited him on several things, mentioning the Wharton School economists not liking his economic plan. That's, of course, where Trump went to school for undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.
KELLY: As he mentioned - as he...
MONTANARO: Right.
KELLY: ...Went out of his way to tell us. Yes.
MONTANARO: Exactly. You know, she talked about his crowds, which really derailed him. There were lots of other examples, and Trump took the bait every single time. She sort of flipped the script on masculinity. She really was the alpha in this debate from beginning to end, which is usually his stance at these debates.
And Trump did so many things that presidential debate coaches would tell you not to do. Like, for example, instead of hammering home a rational point about immigration and a small town not having the resources to respond to an influx of migrants, he instead used this provocative and debunked conspiracy about immigrants in the U.S. illegally eating cats and dogs. Never mind that he got the conspiracy wrong because it was about ducks, not dogs - and Harris was able to paint him as extreme.
KELLY: I want to ask - speaking of debunking conspiracies and other things, you know, back in the June debate, the one that was between Trump and President Biden, we did not hear fact-checks in real time from the moderators. Last night, we did. That was ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis. David Folkenflik, what impact did that have?
FOLKENFLIK: Sure. And back in June, you know, CNN traded that for the right to go after questions that hadn't been answered.
KELLY: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: In this case, you know, you got to be careful 'cause if you get it wrong, as we've learned in the past, it becomes a huge partisan focal point. In this instance, I would say the fact-checks were, you know, restrained, focused, measured, quiet and concise. You know, we talked about the question of animals and this conspiracy theory. Let's listen to David Muir after Trump accused Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city of eating pets.
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DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community. All this...
TRUMP: Well, I've seen people on television...
MUIR: Let me just say here. This is the...
TRUMP: There's people on television...
MUIR: This is a...
TRUMP: ...Saying my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a...
MUIR: Yeah.
TRUMP: ...Good thing to say for a city manager.
MUIR: I'm not taking this from television.
TRUMP: But the people are on television...
MUIR: I'm taking it from the city manager.
TRUMP: ...Saying their dog was eaten.
FOLKENFLIK: So, you know, in past debates when people have tried fact-checking, they became part of the debate. And in this instance, I'd say this was just a tempered measure.
MONTANARO: You know, and Muir's tone here was really a thing that stood out to me because it was pretty lightly fact-checked, right? And Republicans try to cast these fact-checks as bias 'cause there were four last night. All four were toward things that Trump had said. But it's just a reality of the fact that Trump just says more things more often that are blatantly false, and he repeats them.
KELLY: David, stay with the question of bias, perception of bias. How is this being characterized in media coverage that you're tracking today?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, there are kind of three baskets, I would say, of coverage. You've seen folks who are basically partisans on one side or the other. I'd say you'd see folks who are reflecting what we've heard from our colleague Domenico last night and today. And I'd say you'd see those who are so tempered as to be the point of kind of misrepresenting, saying, well, you know, they went at each other in a fiery debate. That didn't really capture what happened last night.
But you know what did happen? Trump unified folks on, you know, say, all three major cable networks, including Fox's Brit Hume, because they were all trying to capture what Domenico got at. Here was Brit Hume, a former chief political anchor for Fox News and often a conservative voice. Here's what Britt had to say last night.
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BRIT HUME: Make no mistake about it - Trump had a bad night. He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him, something I'm sure his advisers had begged him not to do.
FOLKENFLIK: And, you know, we saw in what's called the spin room after the debate - that's where people representing various campaigns or candidates go in to try to tell reporters how they should think about it and frame it - Trump entered the room to do his own spin. He didn't feel he could trust surrogates to make up what he failed to do in the debate itself.
KELLY: And Domenico, hop back in. Yeah.
MONTANARO: Yeah, no, and I was going to say, you know, David mentions this idea of the way that this has been framed. And sometimes, I find that our colleagues really have a difficult time in trying to just say what they know to be independently verifiably true. And it's been sort of dubbed sanewashing (ph), which is sort of taking something that Trump says that might be incoherent but then making it a subject-verb-object thing that then is seemingly more rational and understandable. Also have to say about the going into the spin room - not usually the thing that a presidential candidate who thinks they did well in a debate does.
KELLY: You would normally delegate that to your surrogates. Yeah. OK.
MONTANARO: Yeah. That's why they're there.
KELLY: So I mean, bottom line, big picture, will this debate change voters' minds? Will it help people who still haven't made up their minds make up their mind? Domenico?
MONTANARO: It certainly could. I mean, 30% of the people in our survey, in the NPR/PBS News/Marist survey, said that they, you know, are going to be looking at this debate as something that could help change their minds. But you have to realize that this is a very, very, very divided country. Republicans have had an opportunity for almost a decade to move away from Trump, and they have not chosen to do that. I would not expect that they would after this, either.
You know, Harris has done everything right, you could argue, since getting in this race. She's tacked to the middle, raised half a billion dollars, staffed up, organizing in swing states. Now she outdebated Trump, and she really still could lose. I mean, this is not just, like, a could. It's still a coin flip because these seven states - the seven swing states we're watching closely - are more conservative than the rest of the country at large. And, you know, I think it is reflective of just how divided we are.
KELLY: That is NPR's Domenico Montanaro and David Folkenflik. Thank you to you both.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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