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WATCH: ABC Moderators Fact Check Trump and Let Harris Skate

September 11, 2024

ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact checked former president Donald Trump in real time during Tuesday night's debate. When Vice President Kamala Harris made false statements, they kept quiet.

Muir pushed back on Trump's claim that crime is "up and through the roof," saying the "FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country." Experts say the FBI's stats are incomplete.

Davis, meanwhile, pushed back after Trump said vice presidential nominee Tim Walz supported "execution after birth." While babies in Walz's Minnesota have died shortly after delivery following failed abortion procedures, Davis jumped in to say there is "no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born."

When Harris repeated falsehoods, however, Muir and Davis stood down. Harris, for example, said Trump called anti-Semitic white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., "very fine people," a claim Snopes shot down in June. Harris also said Trump "left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression." Unemployment was 6.4 percent when Trump left office.

Muir and Davis did not interject to fact check those claims.