Donald Trump claimed vindication over ABC News' deceptive and one-sided moderation of the presidential debate, blasting "lightweight" anchor David Muir for violating the terms of an agreement with his campaign. 

Many viewers noticed that the moderators' intrusive "fact checking" tended to focus on Trump, while Kamala Harris was never challenged for making a number of false claims.

Trump claims vindication

In one of the most egregious examples of moderators interfering, Muir "fact checked" Trump for claiming that crime is up.

Days after the debate, the Justice Department released an annual report showing that violent crime has increased. The National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on self-reporting, showed that the violent crime rate remains elevated at 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023, compared to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020.

During a press conference at Trump Tower in New York on Thursday, Trump blasted Muir for correcting his assertion that crime has increased.

"But he corrected me on crime. He said, ‘No, no, crime has not gone up.' I said crime has gone up massively. He said, 'I'd like to state for the record that crime has not gone up,'" Trump said.

While aggressively "fact checking" Trump, the moderators did not challenge Harris for misleading charges, including that Trump called Neo-Nazis "very fine people."

"I had one against three, but I think we did great," Trump said.

ABC broke deal

Trump also said that his campaign had an agreement not to have live "fact-checking," which ABC ignored.

"Now you don't know this, but we had a deal with ABC that there will be no corrections of any kind, and they violated the deal. Why? Because they're bad people, and they're fake news," Trump said.

Kamala Harris was widely described as the winner of the debate, but she did not receive a significant polling bump, with the presidential race remaining neck-and-neck.

Harris has pushed Trump for another debate on CNN, but Trump has said it's "too late" with early voting already underway. Harris previously rejected Trump's proposal to debate on Fox News and NBC.