Rudy Giuliani: “Trump Shouldn’t Participate in Another Debate”

by Brian Nichols

Former New York City Mayor and Donald Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani has been tossing around the notion that Trump may not end up participating in any future general election debates, after what he claimed to be inappropriate meddling on Monday night’s debate by moderator Lester Holt.

“If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised the journalist would act like a journalist, and not an ignorant fact check,” Giuliani said late Monday night in the post-debate spin room, as reported by Bloomberg.

In an attempt to put out the fire created by Giuliani, Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway took to conducting damage control by stating that the GOP nominee would indeed participate in the final two debates.

Giuliani’s criticism of Holt’s moderating seemed to be caused after a tense moment in which Trump was seemingly fact-checked by Holt during the debate when he repeated his support for implementing a nationwide “stop and frisk” program. This program is similar to the one Giuliani approved as mayor of New York in which police search people they stop for questioning. Holt stated that stop and frisk “was ruled unconstitutional in New York” due to its impact on minorities.

“If journalism has ethics, Lester Holt was unethically interfering in the area of law he knows nothing about,” Giuliani said. “It is not unconstitutional and Trump’s description of that case was correct.”

The aftermath of Giuliani’s stop and frisk program in New York has been left in a sort of constitutional limbo, as a circuit court judge did in fact rule the practice to be unconstitutional, but a higher court never settled the question upon appeal.

The second presidential debate will be taking place on October 9 at Washington University in St. Louis with Martha Raddatz (ABC) and Anderson Cooper (CNN) moderating.