"In some ways, it was impressive," Colbert said on his late-night show. "It managed to thread the needle between confusing and boring."
The biggest problem, according to Colbert? The moderators. Not only were they needlessly rude and antagonistic, he said, but at times they seemed woefully unprepared: At one point, moderator Becky Quick asked Donald Trump why she thought he had criticized Mark Zuckerberg on immigration after the billionaire denied it. (As Quick later noted, it was on Trump's campaign website.)
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As Vox's Ezra Klein explained, the questions actually were substantive — especially those about the candidates' mathematically challenged tax plans. But the questions often were interlaced with needless insults — a very legitimate question about how Donald Trump's proposals would cause the deficit to explode, for example, called his campaign "a comic book version of a presidential campaign."
It all added up to a debate disaster. By the end, almost all the candidates had taken turns slamming the moderators and the media, calling the whole thing biased. And, honestly, the CNBC debate made it kind of hard to say that's totally false — although in this case, it's less a conspiracy and more a show of poor preparation.
from a local paper of report concerning the event.
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