Liberals praise ABC debate moderators, mock Trump for his complaints about bias: ‘They lost’

Liberals praised ABC News' presidential debate moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir after the debate and sharply criticized former President Trump for criticizing the moderators, which they said led to his defeat in the debate.

“If you show up in the spin room, you've lost. If you blame the moderators, you've lost,” Politico's Jonathan Lemire said Wednesday on MSNBC's “Morning Joe.”

Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debated Tuesday night, and the vice president was widely considered the winner. Trump entered the spin room after the debate and spoke with reporters, telling several of them he thought he had a great night.

Both moderators checked Trump's statements several times during the debate, but failed to check Harris's statements at all.

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Dasha Burns of NBC News said Wednesday that Trump's immediate reaction to the debate was telling.

“The former president goes into the spin room, which is something you don't traditionally do in politics unless you feel like you didn't do well enough in the debate. After saying he was ready to do another debate, he's now saying maybe not. And he and his team spent much of the day and much of last night attacking the moderators and the network instead of talking about their candidate's performance, which I think is pretty telling,” she told MSNBC's José Díaz-Balart.

CNN's Abby Phillip praised Muir and Davis' fact-checking efforts.

Former CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin said Davis and Muir did an “excellent job.”

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Former Biden-Harris campaign adviser Alencia Johnson told CNN's Jim Acosta on Wednesday: “The reality is that Vice President Harris looked presidential last night and the moderators did a great job of fact-checking Donald Trump.”

Dylan Byers of Puck News said ABC did an “incredibly commendable job.”

CNN's Bakari Sellers said Trump was so “humiliated” by Harris in the debate that he began to blame the moderators.

Justin Baragona, a media columnist at Zeteo, the news site owned by former MSNBC host Medhi Hasan, said Democrats placed similar blame on CNN anchors after the Biden-Trump debate in July.

“If you complain about the referees, you lose,” he wrote on social media.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon also posted a video on social media on Wednesday, saying, “Let's hear some love for the anchors.”

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Fox News contributor Marie Harf reported on “Outnumbered” that a conservative writer admitted to her, “When we complain about the referees, we lose.”

Other conservative commentators, including CNN's Scott Jennings, agreed that blaming the moderators did not bode well for the former president.

“You can't complain about the referees if you don't take jump shots yourself. And that's no excuse for Trump to have gone off topic (at least until his closing argument) and failed to make the central argument that needs to be made: If you want change, you can't keep the same people at the helm,” he wrote in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times.

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MSNBC's Brian Lowry wrote in a column Wednesday that Davis and Muir did a better job at the first debate between Biden and Trump than CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

“The balancing act of modern journalism means you can never please everyone and are constantly in danger of being accused of pulling strings. So we have to give credit to ABC News' David Muir and Linsey Davis, who were able to deftly navigate that fine line for much of Tuesday's debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Particularly notable was the duo's real-time fact-checking of Trump, who has earned a reputation for a loose relationship with the truth,” Lowry wrote.