Trump: We shouldn't have a debate moderator because the system is rigged

What do you call a debate with no moderator? Donald Trump’s suggestion for his faceoff with Hillary Clinton.

Trump on Monday floated a new idea for his upcoming debates against Clinton, proposing a debate without a moderator to avoid a “very unfair” showdown because such a person would go “really hard” against him following Matt Lauer’s performance in NBC News' commander in chief forum last week.


Lauer was panned for aggressively questioning Clinton over her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state while seemingly giving Trump a pass, allowing his false assertion that he never supported the Iraq War to go unchecked.

“As far as the debates are concerned, the system is being gamed because everybody said that I won the debate, you know, the so-called forum that your group put on,” Trump said during a phone interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “But they all said I won and that Matt Lauer was easy on me. Well he wasn’t. He was — I thought he was very professional, I have to be honest. I think he’s been treated very unfairly, but they all said that I won, and what they’re doing is they’re gaming the system so that when I go into the debate, I’m gonna get — be treated very, very unfairly by the moderators.”

Trump compared the NBC News forum and upcoming Sept. 26 debate to a basketball game coached by Bobby Knight, a Trump supporter and former Indiana University head coach.

“Bobby would do numbers on the referee and toward the end of the game, they would just sort of, you know, very sub—maybe subconsciously, they’d give him the calls and, you know, he was a master at it,” Trump said. “Well, they’re doing the same thing now. They’re saying about how Matt Lauer was nice to Trump. He wasn’t nice to me. He was tough on me. He gave me tough [questions]. I answered them better than she did.”

“The fact is,” Trump continued, “that they’re gaming the system, and I think, maybe, we should have no moderator. Let Hillary and I sit there and just debate because I think the system is being rigged so it’s gonna be a very unfair debate, and I can see it happening right now because everyone’s saying that he was soft on Trump. Well now the new person’s gonna try to be really hard on Trump just to show, you know, the establishment what he can do. So I think it’s very unfair what they’re doing. So I think we should have a debate with no moderators — just Hillary and I sitting there talking.”

The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced the general election presidential debate moderators earlier this month: NBC News' Lester Holt, ABC's Martha Raddatz, CNN's Anderson Cooper and Fox News' Chris Wallace, with C-SPAN's Steve Scully serving as a backup moderator.