Home » World » Who is Kristen Welker, the journalist who will be able to silence the candidates in the last presidential debate in the USA?

Who is Kristen Welker, the journalist who will be able to silence the candidates in the last presidential debate in the USA?

“Kristen Welker is a radical leftist Democrat,” Trump said during a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Monday. “She has been screaming questions for a long time and she is not a good one,” added the president.

On Tuesday, Trump returned to the attack, noting that the parents of the journalist, who has covered White House affairs since 2011 and who will be the first black woman to moderate a presidential debate since 1992, are fervent Democrats.

In January, Trump, however, congratulated Welker for becoming a co-host on the NBC weekend morning show. “They made a very wise decision,” Trump said at the time. The Philadelphia-born journalist immediately responded to the compliment by asking the president for an interview, but was never granted it.

Currently, Welker has no political affiliation and has never made donations to a party, although in 2012 he registered as a Democrat.

The 44-year-old journalist will be tasked with replacing veteran Steve Scully, chosen to be the moderator of the second presidential debate, which was scheduled for October 15. However, the duel between presidential candidates was canceled when Trump, then sick with Covid-19, refused to accept a debate in a virtual format.

Scully was later suspended by broadcaster C-SPAN after lying about a tweet linked to the president, which gave Trump, who has a habit of denigrating the media, a new opportunity to call into question the supposed partiality of the media.

Trump questions Welker because the journalist deactivated her Twitter account after the controversies tweets Scully, who claimed to have had the account hacked (which was false, as the journalist later admitted).

NBC explained that Welker’s account deactivation was temporary and for security reasons, so as not to hide anything she may have written in the past.

Accustomed to political interviews, the journalist, known for her incisive questions and calm tone, succeeds Chris Wallace, overwhelmed by Trump’s repeated interruptions when he mediated the first presidential debate, on September 29, which turned into a chaotic struggle for words.

This time, Welker will have the power to silence the microphone of the candidate who does not officially have the floor, which will facilitate the task of the moderator at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, where the debate will take place.

The journalist chose the six main themes of the debate, in line with tradition. Presidential candidates will debate the fight against Covid-19, American families, racial issues, climate change and national security.

“I told her to be herself,” the journalist’s mother, Julie Welker, told the local Philadelphia Tribune. “She is a formidable journalist. Her goal is for the truth to be known and told. And it will be very fair in her moderation of the debate.”

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