2020 US elections: debate committee says it will make changes to the format

The US presidential debating committee says it will soon adopt changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the first disjointed meeting between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

The commission said the debate “made it clear that additional structure must be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.”

One possibility that is being discussed is giving the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is speaking, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The next presidential debate is a town hall format scheduled for October 15 in Miami, Florida.

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Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to gain control of Tuesday’s debate (local time) in Cleveland due to frequent interruptions, mainly by Trump. The candidates interrupted Wallace or his opponent 90 times in the 90-minute debate, 71 of them by Trump, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

Fox News’s Wallace advocated for a more orderly debate, at one point looking at Trump and saying, “The country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with less interruption. I’m asking you, sir, to do it. “

“Ask him too,” Trump said.

“Well, frankly, you’ve been interrupting more than he has,” Wallace said.

Biden called the debate “a national disgrace.” But despite some suggestions that the last two presidential meetings be canceled, both campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend.

Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the commission “was only doing this because their man was hit last night. President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work with the umpires. “

ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, who moderated one of the three Trump-Clinton debates in 2016, said Wallace was in a near-impossible situation. Faced with the same behavior, she said that she could have called an end to the debate for a moment to recalibrate.

She never had the option, technically, to cut off a candidate’s microphone four years ago, she said. Nor was it in the rules agreed in advance by the candidates and the commission.

“To say, ‘He’s not going to play by the rules, so neither are we,’ is an unprecedented situation,” Raddatz said. “That was so out of control.”

Twitter was littered with criticism of Wallace early in the debate for losing control of the proceedings. That was illustrated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who tweeted, “What’s Chris Wallace doing? You have no control over the debate. Ask a question and let Trump keep yelling. This is a shame “.

By the time I was in Good morning joe Scarborough had calmed down the next morning. He called on the debate committee to act.

“While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think we should all walk a mile in his shoes before saying the next morning, ‘He could have done this, he could have done that,'” Scarborough said.

Some of the president’s supporters felt that Wallace was too harsh on their candidate. Trump himself suggested that he was also debating with Wallace, “but that’s no surprise.”