After Monday night’s debate, Donald Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, furious with what he felt was moderator Lester Holt’s bias in favor of Hillary Clinton, suggested Trump refuse to participate in any further debates.
Giuliani blasted, “If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised the journalist would act like a journalist, and not an ignorant fact check. My advice would be the moderator would have to promise they’d be a moderator.”
When Giuliani was queried as to whether he would discuss the matter with Trump, he replied that his conversations with Trump were a private matter. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, insisted that Trump would not eschew participation in the next two debates.
Trump praised Holt after the debate, saying, “I thought Lester did a great job. Honestly, I thought he did a great job. I thought [the questions] were very fair.” But Giuliani asserted that Holt’s “interference” in a discussion about stop-and-frisk in New York was “outrageous,” adding, “If journalism has ethics, Lester Holt unethically interfering in the area of law he knows nothing about. It is not unconstitutional and Trump’s description of that case was correct.”
The exchange that prompted Giuliani’s ire came about at this point.
Trump: Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down. But you take the gun away from criminals that shouldn’t be having it. We have gangs roaming the street. And in many cases, they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants. And they have guns. And they shoot people. And we have to be very strong. And we have to be very vigilant.We have to be — we have to know what we’re doing. Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything. We have to protect our inner cities, because African-American communities are being decimated by crime, decimated.
Holt: Your two — your two minutes expired, but I do want to follow up. Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York, because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.
“If journalism has ethics, Lester Holt unethically interfering in the area of law he knows nothing about.”
Rudy Giuliani
Giuliani approved “stop-and-frisk” as mayor of New York; current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio stopped the program.
Giuliani snapped that Holt’s interruption of Trump dwarfed the incident from 2012 in which moderator Candy Crowley corrected Mitt Romney, even though she was incorrect. Giuliani blasted, “He’s five times Candy Crowley.”