Election-year debates, such as this week's between vice presidential nominees JD Vance and Tim Walz, are a "real problem" as the national news networks are setting them up to go against Republican candidates, former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore told Newsmax on Thursday.
"This is a real problem when these debates are bequeathed to the national news media like CBS," Gilmore said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "This debate was a setup. The last question that was asked just demanded that Vance either break from [Donald] Trump, the ticket leader or look bad. That was what the goal was."
Up until that point, Vance, a GOP senator from Ohio, and Walz, the Democrat governor of Minnesota, were being civil, but with the last question, Walz "becomes an attack dog," said Gilmore.
That, the former governor said, "indicated to me that that last question was a setup and that he knew that was coming."
"He was trained on what his answer was going to be," he said. "The national news people just don't have the credibility anymore to do this. These ladies who were on there, they're basically liberal teleprompter readers. This is not what we should be doing in the future."
Meanwhile, Gilmore said it isn't known whether the Vance-Walz debate changed anything as far as the upcoming election is concerned, but he still believes the event was important.
"Vance had been under tremendous attack for weeks and weeks and weeks, saying that he was unqualified, that he was crazy, that he was extreme, and he presented himself very, very well," said Gilmore. "This was also Walz's first opportunity to say anything nationally. Nobody really knows Walz, and I'm not sure that the debate has cleaned that up for him."
Gilmore added that he believes Vance won the debate, "mainly because he came across as presidential or vice presidential, and I thought he did a very good job."
But he also said he thinks the topics in the debate were "skewed," toward the Democrats' platform.
"There was no longer a question about crime," he said. "It was, instead, Let's blame guns. And then there was no longer a question about debt and inflation. It was, Well, how can we give away money to first-time homeowners? Give away money? How can we do these things while ignoring the national debt, which is a national crisis right now?"
And those "liberal setups" put the Republican Party, not just candidates, at a "disadvantage," said Gilmore.
"The public shouldn't have a debate where one side is put at a disadvantage," he said. "That's what happens in these debates."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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