Here’s How CNN Should Handle Trump at the Debate. But Won’t.

Unsolicited advice for Jake and Dana.

(Composite / Photos: Samuel Corum and Andrew Harnik via GettyImages)

1. Full-Stop

At some point many points tonight, Donald Trump will lie to CNN’s audience.

Some of these lies will be normal political untruths: “Under my administration, we had the greatest economy in history.” Or: “Joe Biden is senile and decrepit.”

But some of them will be extraordinary. Maybe he’ll repeat his claim that President Biden tried to have him assassinated. Perhaps he’ll again predict that in a second Biden term all domestic auto production will cease. And I am willing to bet the milk money that Trump will lie about the 2020 election and claim that he won.

Here is what the CNN moderators should do when Trump posits one of his extraordinary lies: They should stop the debate.

Grind everything to a halt and produce the receipts proving that Trump is lying. These receipts should be on paper and physically at the anchors’ desk. There should be video packages ready and waiting to deploy to viewers supporting them.

And the moderators should not move on until Trump admits that he is lying.

Even if that means that the debate never happens and we get 90 minutes of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash pointing to the evidence and asking Trump the same question, over and over and over.

Even if it means Joe Biden never gets to speak.

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To date, only two people have successfully interviewed Donald Trump: Jonathan Swan and Chris Wallace. They both used the same technique: (1) They brought paper receipts. (2) They aggressively challenged Trump’s extraordinary lies. (3) They refused to move on.

Here’s Swan:

And here’s Wallace:

And a few months ago, with a different guest, George Stephanopoulos showed how useful it is to blow up an interview to spend an entire segment chasing down a liar.

So it is important to understand that while this might all sound like slash fiction, these things can be done. They have been done. In recent memory. By serious journalists.

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Now we are not children. You and I both know that this isn’t going to happen. That’s not a criticism of Tapper and Bash: Such a decision would have to be supported at the highest corporate level and there’s no world in which David Zaslav would sign off on it.

But explaining why CNN should conduct the debate this way and then understanding why it won’t is a useful exercise because it lays bare one of democracy’s vulnerabilities.

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2. Duty

You could make a moral case for CNN aggressively fact-checking Trump at the debate on the question of the 2020 election and even derailing the debate in order to fully litigate it.

• In a liberal society the media should not be agnostic on the subject of liberal democracy.

• “Should free and fair elections be overturned by force?” is a different category of question from “Should the top marginal tax rate be 35 percent or 10 percent?”

In this view, you would describe the media’s obligation to abandon both-sides journalism in the following way:

Both-sides journalism is a not-terrible way to cover normal political candidates, and we’ll make the definition for “normal” at broad as possible: “any candidate who has not attempted a violent overthrow of the federal government.” . . .

Because this carve-out only applies to one guy in the whole of American history.

Truth is, we’ve never had a candidate who is an aspiring autocrat who has already attempted a coup. It is not unreasonable to ask that the best practices for covering him be unique, too.

But asking corporations to think high-minded thoughts about morality is a sucker’s game. So let’s focus on something concrete: Whom does CNN serve?

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The answer is slightly complicated: CNN serves its corporate shareholders. It does so by making money. This money comes primarily from carriage fees and advertising. But that revenue is ultimately dependent on having a user base that believes CNN delivers value to it.

So it’s not crazy to say that CNN exists to deliver value for its audience. That’s the job.

Because CNN is in the journalism business and not the entertainment business, its value proposition is not flattery or confirmation, but information. Another way to put it might be: CNN creates value for its audience by helping people understand the reality around them.

What that means is that every decision CNN makes ought to be made through the lens of: Does this help our audience better understand reality?

Meaning that if CNN is hosting a presidential debate and one of the presidential candidates tells its audience that the 2020 election was stolen, then the most important thing CNN can do for its audience is to demolish that lie, right there, live, all the way to the end.

To leave that lie standing harms CNN’s audience because it detracts from their understanding of reality.¹

We’re going to get to the difference between CNN and The Bulwark in a minute. But today is as good a day as any to join.

3. “The Media”

So why won’t CNN be willing to blow up the debate if/when Trump lies about the 2020 election?

Because, like most media institutions, CNN doesn’t prioritize delivering value to its audience. It prioritizes the meta-perception—and conception—of itself.

That’s why CNN put Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany on the air back in the Trump days. It’s why they’re paying Scott Jennings right now: To lie to their audience in the service of being able to tell themselves that CNN is not “partisan” and is always willing to present both sides of the political spectrum, even if one side is trying to subtract value from its audience’s understanding of reality.

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I realize I’m being unfair. I’m asking CNN to be The Bulwark.

I have a lot of sympathy for the people at CNN. They believe that they are in the honesty business and that honesty requires hearing from all sides and not putting their thumbs on the scale. If this version of honesty means presenting dishonest people to CNN’s audience from time to time, then so be it. Such is the price of maintaining public trust.

At The Bulwark, we’re in the reality business.

Everything we do starts with the question of duty: Our duty is to provide value to you and that value takes the form of making you smarter about reality and the world around us.

We aren’t here to confirm your priors, or to stoke outrage, or to get clicks. We’re here to explain what is happening and why. Sometimes we will talk about what should happen and in those cases we will discuss why we think it should happen. But we will never confuse what we want with what reality is.

Part of what that means is that if Joe Biden gaks it at the debate tonight, we will tell you the truth about it, even though we believe such an event would be bad for liberal democracy.

So come and do the reality business with us tonight on the debate livestream. I’ll be joined by Mona Charen, Andrew Egger, A.B. Stoddard, and Bill Kristol. We’ll give you some table-setting and drink-pouring before the show. We’ll pop in with quick reactions during the commercial breaks. And then we’ll do some gut reactions immediately after. And all the while, you guys can hang with the community in the chat.

We’re building the kind of media that democracy deserves. Come and join us. You won’t regret it.

1. Yes, there’s an opportunity cost calculation to be made. If demolishing a lie about the 2020 election standing means missing out on chances to elucidate other parts of reality by questioning the candidates that’s not nothing.

But in the case of two presidents running against one another, how much more elucidation is there to be had? Driving a stake through the heart of the 2020 election lie is the single biggest piece of value CNN could deliver to its audience and outweighs whatever good might be achieved by getting the candidates to contrast their views on healthcare or corporate tax rates.