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In the lead-up to last night’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, many hosts on Russian TV were predicting that the former president would leave Philadelphia the victor, airing mocking clips of the vice president and repeating critical lines from the likes of Fox News.
Now, with many regarding Tuesday’s debate as a clear Harris win, some Russian channels have been left scrambling to explain what happened.
Their explanations have ranged from subterfuge to biased moderators, according to an analysis and translations from Russia analyst and Daily Beast columnist Julia Davis.
State TV host Vladimir Solovyov joined many on the right in hammering the debate moderators for real-time fact-checking, including debunking Trump’s baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets.
“Why would he do that? I thought he was supposed to be unbiased,” Solovyov said.
Others on Russian TV claimed Trump had been “sabotaged” or “disadvantaged.”
Some, however, argued the debate performance was in fact Trump’s own responsibility.
“She [Kamala Harris] managed to lure Trump into every trap she set up for him... I wish I hadn’t watched that,” a panelist from the Russian International Affairs Council, Alexey Naumov, reportedly said.
One notable Russian TV appearance came from Dimitri Simes, a foreign policy expert and former Trump campaign adviser, who has been accused of breaking U.S. sanctions while working for a Russian state TV network.
Simes, who has denied wrongdoing, offered his best guess about the details of Trump’s plans on the war in Ukraine, one of the areas where the former president was vague on Tuesday.
Simes told one program that the former president would tell Ukraine to concede to all of Putin’s demands and threaten to cut off U.S. aid if he didn’t.
Back in the U.S., Trump was offering explanations of his own, simultaneously claiming debate host ABC was a “terrible network” and claiming he won the night.
“I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night,” Trump told Fox News when asked if there would be a second debate. “We won the debate.”
Potential voters don’t seem to agree.
A snap CNN poll after the debate found 63 percent believe Harris won the debate, a sentiment shared by a variety of commentators, including from The Independent.
Pop star Taylor Swift also endorsed the Harris campaign the night of the debate, adding further momentum to the Democratic side, even as it enraged conservative commentators like Megyn Kelly.
In perhaps the ultimate sign that things weren’t quite well in GOPland, Trump himself went into the “spin room” on Tuesday night, a duty usually reserved for campaign aides and surrogates looking to put an after-the-fact gloss on whatever actually happened during the debate.
