Trump was ready to attack the debate and CNN’s moderators. Joe Biden changed all that.

Donald Trump and his campaign went into Thursday night’s presidential debate with a very clear strategy – one they had already hinted at days before the candidates met in person in Atlanta: no matter what, attack CNN as “fake news,” criticize the debate rules despite agreeing to them, and attack CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, calling them biased against Trump, unfair and responsible for a lousy debate.

Then everything changed.

Joe Biden’s poor performance – enough to cause widespread panic among Democrats – dominated cable news coverage as soon as the debate ended, forcing the Trump team to make a massive shift in course. Forget CNN. Don’t do or say anything that might take the focus away from Joe Biden and whether the debate proved he had to go.

“To be fair to Fake News CNN, Fake Jake and Fake Dana,” said Sean Hannity, primetime host on Fox News Channel, “for one evening they put aside their prejudice and hatred of Donald Trump and actually asked questions and waited for answers.”

“I thought they handled the debate pretty well, which I didn’t expect,” Hannity said in the network’s post-show coverage. “So, I guess, credit (to CNN) for an evening.”

“I think the moderators did a very good job,” Trump’s senior adviser Jason Miller said in an interview with NewsNation. “I thought it was very fair.”

Biden’s camp, meanwhile, picked up where Trump left off, attempting to deflect criticism of their candidate by attacking CNN, Tapper and Bash. For the Biden team, CNN failed by not fact-checking Trump’s statements. Trump – as expected – repeated many of the same lies he tells in speeches, including his repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro defended the president in an interview with CNN on Friday morning, criticizing CNN, saying, “It’s not easy debating a pathological liar, and that’s what Joe Biden had to do last night… and frankly, I think CNN could have done a better job of calling out those lies.”

The debate — with muted microphones and no live audience, somewhat sapping the spontaneity of a traditional presidential debate — was stilted and lacked the drama that makes debates, as political theater, both informative and entertaining. While Tapper and Bash tried to force the candidates to answer their questions when they digressed to other topics, they did not address Trump’s lies or Biden’s mistakes.

A CNN insider told Mediaite that the debate was “a debacle,” saying that “we messed it up” and that “there should have been a fact-check.”

A Democrat close to the Biden camp told Mediaite: “CNN should be ashamed… Jake and Dana are good journalists, but last night they were not journalists. They were statues demeaning their profession and who should be angry at their employer for not allowing them to do their jobs. Which objectively they did not. Not once. I don’t know how they will ever recover and be taken seriously again.”

Jonathan Last, writing in the Bulwark before the debate, predicted that CNN’s moderators would let Trump be Trump without calling him out on his lies. “Here’s what CNN moderators should do when Trump tells one of his extraordinary lies: They should stop the debate,” Last wrote. “Bring everything to a halt and present evidence that Trump is lying. That evidence should be on paper and physically at the moderators’ desks. There should be video packages ready to be made available to viewers to support them. And the moderators should not continue until Trump admits he is lying.”

“We’re not kids anymore. We both know that’s not going to happen,” Last concluded. “This is not a criticism of Tapper and Bash: Such a decision would have to be supported at the highest levels of the company, and there is no world in which David Zaslav would sign it.”

In the run-up to the debate, Trump and his supporters had laid the groundwork for a convincing “CNN is to blame for everything” story in the event that Trump failed.

CNN this morning Moderator Kasie Hunt even canceled an interview with a Trump campaign spokesperson who had attacked Tapper and Bash as biased. “Ma’am, I will cancel this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues,” Hunt interrupted Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. “I want to talk about Donald Trump and Joe Biden.”

ForbesCNN moderator ends interview after Trump’s press secretary attacked CNN debate moderatorsFrom Mark Joyella

Others questioned the way CNN produced the debate. “But I mean, honestly, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if after this debate tonight we’re talking about what a flop this was,” said Fox News Channel’s Martha MacCallum.

“But I think that’s going to be very strange. And I also think that there’s no sense of an audience in the room, there’s no people, and they chose this huge room for it, which I don’t understand. You know, when they shot Nixon-Kennedy, it was in a TV studio because it was just the two of them, there was no audience. So it was a totally different feeling. So, I don’t know, you know, we’ll see how it works out.”

In the end, the debate itself seemed almost irrelevant.

“All the details of the debate are not important,” said Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume. “One thing was more important than anything else tonight, and that was Joe Biden’s conduct. And from the moment he opened his mouth and from the first question he got, America thought this man should not be re-elected.”

“The question is, we know Joe Biden can govern,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Friday morning. “He can run the White House. He can govern the country effectively despite the barrage of lies that constantly come his way, like the lies from Donald Trump last night. But can he run for president in 2024?”

“He tragically failed to handle the situation last night,” Scarborough said on Good morning, Joe“We saw last night why this race was so close. And why I fear that if things don’t change, Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.”