As we all know, the mainstream media have for the last nine years given up any pretense of impartiality because, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it, “they proclaimed Donald Trump too dangerous to be president and therefore any means they employed to stop him were to be justified.  And they are doing so yet a third time in 2024.”

Regarding this Tuesday’s upcoming debate with Trump on ABC, not only did Kamala Harris just lose in her attempt to make a late change to the rules on the silent mic, but Matt Margolis reports that Kamala’s debate preparation is not going well, either.

You know what that means: aside from the usual biased debate questions about Trump of the sort “Is Trump’s and the GOP’s position on a woman’s right to choose too extreme for most Americans?” and “Does Trump’s demeanor make him unfit to be president?,” and softball questions about Kamala of the sort “How historic would it be for a woman of color to be president?,” I almost expect ABC to give Kamala the debate questions in advance in order to save democracy.  Why should we expect ABC to be at all different from CNN (examples in the last paragraph below) in this regard?  And as we know from a whole slew of media behaviors (Trump-Russia collusion, Hunter Biden laptop, etc.), it won’t matter if ABC is exposed for debate bias and impropriety after the election or even soon after the debate (even ironclad proof no doubt would be censored, at least until after the election), so long as the damage is inflicted and its candidate wins.

Now, you might think Trump is brilliant and, as he did with Joe Biden, will use the debate to his advantage.  Perhaps.  But Biden’s dementia and brain freeze would have been exposed no matter who his opponent was.  Perhaps Kamala could be coached to answer the questions she knows will be coming without a cackle or a word salad — something she might not be able to do with unexpected questions — and then keep her responses to Trump to a minimum or simply tout her own experience.  In this case, if the public at large doesn’t get to see the true Kamala it otherwise would, the debate might turn out to be yet another example of the media deciding the presidential election.

Is there anything Trump can do about this?  Well, if he even senses that Kamala is being fed the questions in advance, or that a moderator is breaking the agreed upon rules and is acting partisan, or at least that Kamala is being given softball questions — the latter a virtual certainty — he should call it out at the debate.  He can point out an MSM debate pattern, with Candy Crowley inserting herself into the debate for Barack Obama and against Mitt Romney, Donna Brazile passing on at least one question to Hillary Clinton in her town hall debate with Trump, and just recently co-moderator Dana Bash surreptitiously trying to assist Joe Biden in the Trump-Biden debate.  If he does it right, with America watching live, he can score bigly.

W.A. Eliot is a pseudonym.

Image: Department of Defense via Picryl, public domain.