You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.

Chris Wallace is the presidential debate’s most interesting wild card.

Kris Conner/Getty

We basically know what to expect from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton will almost certainly play it safe. She and her team surely know that as long as she doesn’t pass out on stage, she’ll be fine. And Trump will do everything in his power to humiliate Clinton. He will dredge up scandals that have been dredged and dredged and dredged some more, like Benghazi and the email server, and will probably say that Mosul is in Syria or something. For this, he will be given a passing grade by a significant portion of pundits after the debate.

But debate moderator and decent nepotism hire Chris Wallace may try to push the debate off this expected script. In general, Clinton supporters have been apprehensive about his role, and for good reason. Wallace works at Fox News and anyone who has watched him host Fox News Sunday in recent weeks knows that he has essentially treated the various allegations of sexual assault against Trump and the Wikileaks revelations about Clinton as being of equal importance.

Wallace will undoubtedly press Clinton on WikiLeaks, but he is a mischievous little gremlin, which means that he’ll also probably have a set of traps in store for Trump. In the March 3 Republican debate, Wallace set a humiliating snare for Trump about his budget proposals:

This is Wallace at his best and most interesting. The third and final debate will likely be familiar (by being a shitshow), but Wallace may have a card or two up his sleeve.