Amid the fallout from Tuesday's debate chaos, Chris Wallace blames President Donald Trump for it, but he does admit a proposal to cut mics during a debate would be a dangerous and unfair solution.
"I'm not sure any of the possible changes," Wallace told Fox News' "Bill Hemmer Reports" on Thursday. "Take the one that's been talked about most and that's the idea of cutting off mics.
"Boy, I don't want to be in the position of saying I'm going to interpose myself between the president and the public and say, 'you can't get what he has to say now,'" Wallace told Hemmer. "That's a pretty tough spot to put any moderator in."
Trump himself tweeted Thursday he would not agree to debate changes by the Presidential Commission on Debates:
"Why would I allow the Debate Commission to change the rules for the second and third Debates when I easily won last time?"
Regardless, Wallace noted, even muting a mic, the sound of an interruption would still come through the other candidate's mic.
"In this debate, they were 6 to 8 feet from each other," he added. "If you would cut off the presidents mic, you would have still heard it. The present would've still been interrupting and distracting Biden."
Wallace did not want the debate to be mere question and answer sessions, like a mic-cutting debate would be. The back and forth makes for a true and lively debate, Wallace said.
"So often these debates become parallel news conferences where one candidate answers the question, the other candidate answers the question to him," he added. "When the president started to engage with Biden, I thought we are going to have a real debate here. It became clearer and clearer over time that this was something different.
"And that the president was determined to try to but in and throw Joe Biden off."
Wallace went further and said Trump "bears the primary responsibility for what happened on Tuesday."
"America wanted to see which was a serious exchange of views," he added. "I felt like I had gotten together all of the ingredients. I had baked this beautiful, delicious cake and then frankly the president put his foot in it.
"It was frustrating for me because I tried hard to prepare for a serious debate, much more frustrating and more importantly for the American people because they didn't get the debate they wanted – that they deserved. I think that's a loss for the country. They didn't get to hear these two guys nearly as much as I think they should have."
Wallace, who is reportedly a registered Democrat and criticized by conservatives as pro-Biden, did give Trump some advice for future debates: Let Biden trip himself up without interruption.
"He would've been well advised to pull back and let Biden talk more, because Biden's answers weren't always great," Wallace concluded. "In fact sometimes, if the president had stepped back and let Biden give his answers, he could've been more effective in picking them apart."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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