C-SPAN’s longtime host Steve Scully, scheduled to moderate next week’s presidential town-hall debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden that may or may not happen, received a robust vote of confidence Friday from Chris Wallace and a host of prominent Republicans the morning after a post from his Twitter account prompted a political media uproar. Fox News Sunday host Wallace, who moderated last week’s presidential debate, along with Fox News commentator Karl Rove and former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer were among Scully’s defenders after Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, announced that a question tweeted […]
Chris Wallace
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Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said on Friday that he sees no issue with the Commission on Presidential Debates making the second debate virtual amid President Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, saying the president’s own behavior brings up “serious questions. Early on Thursday morning, the CPD announced that due to concerns over the president’s ongoing battle with COVID-19, they would have the candidates debate from remote locations rather than in-person. A furious Trump, meanwhile, immediately pulled out of the virtual debate, saying he was “not going to waste my time” with it. During an appearance on America’s Newsroom, Wallace first addressed the […]
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace confronted Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes on Sunday over the Trump camp’s refusal to wear masks during recent events including the presidential debate, prompting Cortes to loudly complain that Wallace was “starting to harangue” him. During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Cortes first likened President Donald Trump’s hospitalization for COVID-19 to a trip on baseball’s injured list, insisting that the president’s “going to be back in again throwing 95-mile-an-hour fastballs.” Wallace, unimpressed with the Trump flack’s analogy, quickly brought up Trumpworld’s irresponsibility when it comes to social distancing and mask-wearing. “I want to go back […]
Saturday Night Live was presumably ready to kick off its 46th season with a big Trump vs. Biden debate sketch cold open. Then came the October surprise. Yes, SNL made its triumphant return to Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center this weekend amidst the still-raging coronavirus pandemic after airing a series of entirely virtual shows this past spring. And even though the debate feels like a “hundred years ago,” SNL stuck with the plan so they could highlight their new mega-guest star in the form of Jim Carrey as former Vice President Joe Biden. “Good evening, I’m your moderator Chris Wallace and […]
In his first on-air appearance since Tuesday night’s chaotic presidential debate that he moderated, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace on Thursday placed the blame on President Donald Trump for the debate devolving into what a CNN reporter described as a “shitshow.” Wallace, one of the most respected and revered newsmen in the business, has weathered a storm of criticism over his inability to maintain control on Tuesday as Trump quickly disregarded the rules and began steamrolling Wallace and Joe Biden, something he acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times. “I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks […]
Fox News host Tucker Carlson didn’t say a critical word about his colleague Chris Wallace on Wednesday night, even as the Fox News anchor has taken a ton of heated criticism from right-wing pundits (and even some Fox News commentators) over their belief that Wallace treated President Donald Trump unfairly at Tuesday’s presidential debate. Instead, the primetime conservative star sat back and let two of his favorite frequent guests trash his co-worker on air, saying nothing in return while nodding along silently. The situation, meanwhile, recalled a similar incident last year which eventually resulted in the departure of longtime Fox News […]
CNN anchor Jake Tapper booted Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh on Wednesday after the Trump flack continued to deflect when pressed on the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacists, invoking the much-maligned moderator of Tuesday’s debate in the process. Following an off-the-rails presidential debate that was described by reporters as a “shitshow,” President Donald Trump has faced intense backlash for telling the far-right group Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” while refusing to disavow right-wing extremists and white supremacy. After multiple aides tried to clean up his remarks on Wednesday by blaming debate moderator Chris Wallace or claiming […]
Poor Chris Wallace, the debate moderator who couldn’t. As the first—and possibly last—televised presidential shoutfest of the 2020 general election campaign devolved Tuesday night from the worst Thanksgiving dinner ever to a drunken, knife-wielding bar fight between Donald Trump and Joe Biden amid shattered beer mugs, the Fox News Sunday anchor was powerless to stop the American carnage. “Chris Wallace did not act as moderator. Donald Trump was the abuser and Chris Wallace was among the abused,” MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace (no relation) said when it was all over and the only thing left to do was shoot the wounded. “The debate […]
Tuesday’s “debate” was a trainwreck. A national embarrassment. A disgrace. If Joe Biden were looking for a pretext to skip the next two debates, he found it. It would be hard to blame him for concluding this is simply a waste of everyone’s time. We’ll see. From the start of this debate, Donald Trump interrupted Biden. Repeatedly. For a while there, it looked like Biden was going to get destroyed—that Trump would simply run over him and Biden would be left sitting there, with that far away look in his eyes. But Biden rallied. He embraced the shit-show format, grew stronger […]
Shepard Smith’s new CNBC show is called simply The News. And with that in mind, the former Fox News anchor is trying his best to play everything right down the middle. Ahead of his premiere this Wednesday, Smith appeared on his new network colleague Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, where he offered up a series of non-committal, both-sides takes on the biggest news events of the week. Smith got in one joke about Donald Trump writing off $70,000 in hairstyling expenses but otherwise said he didn’t expect the bombshell report on the president’s tax returns to change any voters’ minds. He similarly […]
The closing night of President Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention, presented unethically and unsafely to the country in front of a huge crowd at the White House last Thursday, was meant to project a show of force against the Democrats’ virtual convention the week before. And yet the TV ratings for the RNC were down compared to the DNC across the board and now the Trump campaign is being accused of holding yet another “super-spreader event.” Speaking to Trump campaign spokesperson Lara Trump this weekend, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked pointedly about the president’s upcoming campaign schedule. “The president […]
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and senior political analyst Brit Hume ripped President Donald Trump’s 70-minute Republican National Convention speech on Thursday night, describing it as “surprisingly flat” and lacking in “excitement.” Following the precedent-busting address from the White House in which the president accepted his party’s nomination, the “All-Star Panel” at the president’s favorite cable news channel largely gave his lengthy and rambling speech a thumbs down. Wallace, noting that the “impressive” post-speech fireworks were still booming in the air, said he “was surprised at the lack of fireworks at the president’s speech tonight.” Pointing out that “it was far […]
Monday night on Fox News, Brit Hume was the sole dissenting voice who had anything negative to say about Michelle Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech, accusing the former first lady of distorting and exaggerating the facts in her admittedly “effective” speech. When it came time for him to weigh in on former second lady Jill Biden’s speech on Tuesday night, he decided to draw a pointed contrast between the two women. “I think this speech tonight by Jill Biden was tremendously effective in the sense that it didn’t have a hard, angry edge that we heard last night to a considerable […]
Weeks after pressing President Donald Trump on whether he’d accept the results of the November election, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said on Tuesday that he finds it “troubling” that the president is claiming the only way he’ll lose is if the election is “rigged.” During his wide-ranging and contentious interview with Wallace last month, the president repeatedly declined to say he’d accept the election results if he loses, telling the Fox newsman that he’ll “have to see” while adding that “mail-in voting is going to rig the election.” In the final 2016 presidential debate, which was moderated by Wallace, Trump […]
Birtherism is back, this time aimed squarely at Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris. And the people charged with speaking for President Donald Trump on cable news are having a lot of trouble defending his inability to outright condemn the racist attacks on his rival. It was the very first question that Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace had for senior Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes. “Does the Trump campaign, does President Trump acknowledge that Kamala Harris is eligible to be the next vice president of the United States?” he asked. “Yes, he made this very clear in his press conference […]
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace interrupted his guest’s attacks on Joe Biden to bring up some important points about the Trump campaign this weekend. “Despite what you say about the Biden campaign, the fact is it is the Trump campaign that just replaced your campaign manager,” Wallace told Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller. “It’s the Trump campaign that just paused all television advertising for six days to recalibrate.” From there, Wallace put up on the screen a series of polling averages that show Trump trailing Biden by wide margins both nationally and in three of the crucial swing states he […]
Starting in the final year of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, President Donald Trump would periodically repeat to his personal lawyer and political advocate Rudy Giuliani a key, three-word phrase. “Control the agenda,” he’d privately tell his attorney, according to three people who’ve heard the president say this. Trump would deploy the phrase specifically when commenting on, and attaboying, Giuliani’s latest television appearances, media hits that would at times turn comically combative, careen off the rails, and seem to create bigger public-relations headaches than they were worth. No matter, the president typically advised. So often, the point wasn’t to keep […]
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace found himself entangled in a weird and bizarre debate with President Donald Trump over the president’s cognitive tests boasts, pointing out how easy the test is and that one of the questions merely asks the taker to identify a picture of an elephant. Speaking to Fox News host and close confidant Sean Hannity earlier this month, the president bragged that Walter Reed doctors were “very surprised” that he recently “aced” a cognitive test, calling on former Vice President Joe Biden to take the same exam. “They said, ‘that’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what […]
President Donald Trump refused to believe that America has one of the highest coronavirus mortality rates in the world and brushed off the rising death toll from the pandemic during a combative and contentious Sunday interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. In his first interview with the veteran news anchor in nearly two years, the president immediately grew incensed when Wallace pressed him on the surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, something that Trump has insisted is due to just “burning embers” and increased testing. “That’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world. […]
“We talked about everything,” Chris Wallace told Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer on Friday afternoon, previewing his first sit-down with President Donald Trump in nearly two years. The full interview will air on Fox News Sunday this weekend, but two short clips released in advance demonstrate how contentious it promises to be. Seated what appeared to be less than six feet apart, Wallace asked Trump if he regrets not wearing a mask in public earlier than this past weekend. “The CDC says if everyone wore a mask for four-to-six weeks, we could get this under control,” the host said of the […]
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace was apparently not in the mood for Team Trump’s spin on Sunday morning, repeatedly pushing back at Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp’s excuses for President Donald Trump’s poor campaign rally attendance. For days ahead of Saturday night’s lightly attended rally in Tulsa, the Trump campaign set sky high expectations for the turnout, boasting about the roughly one million tickets that had been requested while setting up an outdoor stage for an expected overflow crowd. In the end, however, only 6,200 attendees showed up to the 19,000-capacity BOK Center, resulting in large swaths of empty seats. Interviewing […]
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace opened his interview this weekend with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson by asking about the “terrible incident” in Atlanta that ended with the fatal police shooting of 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks after he was found sleeping in his car. As Wallace put it, Brooks was “clearly resisting arrest” when he apparently grabbed one of the officer’s Tasers and ran away from them. But, he asked, ”was it appropriate to use deadly force against somebody whose original offense was that he fell asleep in the drive-thru lane at a Wendy’s?” After suggesting that perhaps he […]
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace was on The Late Show Tuesday night to promote his new book on the atomic bomb. But Stephen Colbert really wanted to talk to him about this explosive moment in American politics. “Have you ever seen anything like the moment we’re going through right now?” Colbert asked at the top of the interview. “The only year that comes to mind is 1968,” Wallace replied. But even with everything going on then, he said, there wasn’t a global pandemic that has claimed over 100,000 American lives and led to economic collapse. “So that’s an added feature […]
Towards the end of his interview with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) on Sunday morning, Fox News host Chris Wallace forced his guest to reckon with the series of incendiary tweets President Donald Trump posted over the weekend as anti-police violence protests raged across the country. Paraphrasing his previous guest, Dr. Cornel West, the Fox News Sunday host said, “We have to talk not only about what is going on in the riots in the street, we have to talk about what is going on among people at the highest levels of our society.” Wallace began with the tweet that Twitter hid […]
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace didn’t get the chance to confront White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany directly this weekend. So Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade did it for him. About halfway through her appearance on that show Tuesday morning, Kilmeade brought up a comment McEnany made during her Friday press conference. “Boy, it’s interesting to be in a room that desperately wants to seem to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed,” she told reporters, some of whom objected in the moment to that blatant condescension. As Kilmeade put it, “Some of the press got insulted,” […]
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace pressed White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx on the rising coronavirus death count, asking Birx if the Trump administration has “underestimated” the strength of the virus as it rushes to fully reopen the economy. With all 50 states now at least partially reopened amid the pandemic and people flocking to beaches and parks to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend, the Fox News Sunday host noted that models have increasingly upped their projections of COVID-19 deaths as states ease social-distancing restrictions. “Early this coming week we’re going to reach 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus […]
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace tore into White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Sunday morning for questioning the religious beliefs and faith of White House reporters, saying he’s never seen a press secretary act like that in his long career. Following President Donald Trump’s Friday announcement in which he demanded that all houses of worship reopen “right now” and toothlessly threatened to “override” governors who have limited gatherings due to coronavirus restrictions, McEnany took a snide shot at the press corps. Asked what federal powers Trump had to force states to open up places of worship during the pandemic, McEnany […]
Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace pressed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on his overly optimistic outlook for the economy in the second half of the year, directly asking Mnuchin on Sunday if his “rosy predictions” were based more on the upcoming presidential election rather than reality. Discussing April’s devastating jobs report that saw the unemployment figure jumping up to nearly 15 percent, Wallace kicked off his Sunday interview with Mnuchin by noting that the numbers don’t reflect the seven million jobs lost since mid-April or the millions of Americans who are underemployed and not looking for work. “So Mr. Secretary, what […]