EXCERPT:
HAYES: "I just thought it summed up. Bret Baier, pivoting around in an aggrieved, petulant tone, desultory, being like, 'We have to do the Trump section. So everyone who disagrees, 'Shut the hell up.'"
MADDOW: "He wasn't petulant. He was aggrieved, but not petulant."
HAYES: "'We have to get through the Trump section, okay?' And it’s like, right, that's the whole vibe of the whole thing. It was like, 'We will have 45 minutes where these people all debate each other to become the nominee. This guy’s not there.' But then it's like, 'We have to go check this box.' The box is, 'There is a guy who’s running 40 points ahead, who tried to end the constitutional republic, and whose braying mobs chanted for the murder of one of the guys onstage. Let’s just go through that and then we can get back to...' It's like, okay, I get — the resentment they all have around it, that was just encapsulated. And also the weirdness of this debate, of him not being there but looming in that way, like, to me, the Bret Baier moment was kind of like, if you need 10 seconds of what was this debate about."