Fox News Channel unfairly savaged Donald Trump in a bid to prove the cable network is not merely a Republican house organ — and ended up handling Thursday's GOP presidential debate "very poorly," political analyst and Newsmax contributor Dick Morris says.
"I think they were trying to prove that Fox news is impartial, that it's not a conservative and Republican organ," Morris said Friday on
Newsmax TV's "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"As such, they were putting their perceptions and their individual pursuit of Pulitzer Prizes ahead of what the audience wanted, which was a fair, rational, and open discussion of the variations in the Republican points of view."
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Fox News, which for years has been accused of slanting its programming towards conservatives, was feeling their backlash on Friday as they charged the network was biased and unfair in the manner it approached the debate forum, and namely, Donald Trump.
They were particularly roiled, as was Trump, when Fox News star Megyn Kelly pointedly asked the billionaire developer about past statements he's made about women.
And some also bristled at the opening question as to whether all the candidates would pledge not to run as a third-party candidate if they didn't get the nomination — something Trump has vowed to possibly do.
"It became a sort of gotcha event and they handled it very poorly and it reflects a trend in Fox News that's very disturbing," said Morris, who believes that despite Fox's pounding of the GOP frontrunner, Trump still won the debate.
"He would never be an also-ran. He's noisy enough. He was the winner because he showed that he could take all of the punches and he had good answers for them," Morris said.
"Did he preside over the bankruptcy of some companies? Yeah, and he made a lot of money for his company, his shareholders, and kept a lot of people in jobs. Did he take advantage of tax laws? Yeah, like everybody else did.
"His answers were convincing and such contrast with Hillary [Clinton]. When she's caught with an embarrassing situation, [she] lies her way through it and then seals it and pretends to fudge what she's done. Donald jut admitted it and said, 'hey, like it or leave it, this it me.' I thought it was great."
Morris — author of
"Power Grab: Obama's Dangerous Plan for a One-Party Nation," written with Eileen McGann and published by Humanix — said the candidates were in two camps, the mainstream Republican court and the conservative court.
He said the mainstream factor consisted of former Florida Gov. Bush pitted against New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. On the conservative side, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee "and maybe" retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson.
"In the conservative court, Cruz really did great. His answers were aggressive, they were specific, they were very hard. He made the point that we keep winning elections and losing the peace ... We elect these leaders and then they sell out," Morris said.
"Walker was badly hurt with that question about did you support amnesty for eight years on the immigration issue and he basically admitted that he had and I do not think that he can sustain these positions, the conservative frontrunner, with that act out there.
"Rubio was as always very polished, but I didn't think there was a bite to it. I felt like we were watching a vice president and not a president."
Huckabee, Morris said, did a "great job" in secularizing his agenda and on social security, fair tax, and Wall Street … He really succeeded in punching out of that sort of evangelical ghetto in which the media has confined him. Huckabee and Cruz come out as the winners."
Morris was not at all impressed with Bush, who he said did not act like a frontrunner.
"If you go back and look at clips of then 2000 debate, [his brother] George Bush did much better. The other point is that Bush is in competition with Christie," he said.
"Going into the debate Christie was an afterthought who made it in at the last minute by the skin of his teeth and he had lost any real credibility. Coming out of that debate, Christie's strong, aggressive, feisty, and Bush is kind of lackluster."
Morris said he was also impressed by former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who was part of the so-called "happy hour debate" of second-tier GOP candidates — but isn't sure of her overall viability.
"She's very good. The Republicans are looking, voters are looking for a woman to run against Hillary. The concern I've always had about her is that I don't want to be stuck having to explain all of the layoffs at her company in the same sense that we had to explain all the Bain Capital misfortunes that [Mitt] Romney encountered," he said.
"When you run a candidate on their business record, you really subject yourself to a tremendous risk because while politicians can hedge their political risks, the decision you make in business that are good business decisions play horribly often with the public as a whole."
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