Donald Trump Will Skip Remaining Debates if Hillary Clinton is There-Fiction!

Donald Trump Will Skip Remaining Debates if Hillary Clinton is There-Fiction!

Summary of eRumor:
Donald Trump has said he’ll skip the remaining presidential debates if Hillary Clinton will be there.
The Truth:
Rumors about Donald Trump skipping the remaining presidential debates sprang from a satirical column that appeared in the New Yorker magazine after the first debate.
The satirical column was written by Andy Borowitz and appeared at the New Yorker website a day after the first presidential debate. The column, which appeared under the headline, “Trump Threatens to Skip Remaining Debates if Hillary is There,” begins:

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (The Borowitz Report)—Plunging the future of the 2016 Presidential debates into doubt, Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday morning that he would not participate in the remaining two debates if Hillary Clinton is there.

Trump blasted the format of Monday night’s debate by claiming that the presence of Clinton was “specifically designed” to distract him from delivering his message to the American people.

“Every time I said something, she would say something back,” he said. “It was rigged.”

He also lambasted the “underhanded tactics” his opponent used during the debate. “She kept on bringing up things I said or did,” he added. “She is a very nasty person.”

Taken out of context on social media, some believed that the column was actually true. Trump surrogates who took issue with how the first debate was handled and hinted at needed changes in future debates fed that speculation.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, told Politico that he’d skip the remaining debates if he were Donald Trump:

Donald Trump should skip the next two debates unless he gets special guarantees from the moderators, former New York mayor and top Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani told reporters after the debate.

Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor who moderated the debate, should be “ashamed of himself,” Giuliani said after the debate. He said Holt was wrong to attempt to fact-check Trump on the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk and his claimed opposition to the Iraq War.

“If I were Donald Trump I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact checker,” Giuliani said. “The moderator would have to promise that there would be a moderator and not a fact checker and in two particular cases an enormously ignorant, completely misinformed fact checker.”

There’s been no indication if Trump will demand changes to the formats of the remaining two debates, the Republican presidential nominee hasn’t given an indication one way or another. However, reports that Trump will refuse to attend debates if Clinton is there are false.