US presidential debate moderator Kristen Welker praised for taming Trump

The moderator of the final US presidential debate received praise for being "even-handed" and managing to keep control, even from notoriously difficult-to-please Donald Trump.

Where the first debate, moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace in Ohio last month, descended into a slanging match, NBC’s Kristen Welker was commended for keeping the duelling candidates in check.

Ms Welker, 44, the channel's White House correspondent and Weekend Today co-anchor, commanded the room in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday night, making sure the candidates stuck to their allotted time and interjected when needed.

She first black woman to moderate a presidential debate in nearly 30 years.

Ahead of the debate, Ms Welker was the target of Mr Trump’s Twitter rage. "She’s always been terrible & unfair, just like most of the Fake News reporters, but I’ll still play the game," he tweeted on Saturday. "The people know!"

"Somebody owes our colleague Kristen Welker an apology," Brian Williams, her colleague at MSNBC News, said immediately after the debate.

Jack Shafer of Politico, however, pointed out that Ms Welker did a good job but this was not "the same Trump Wallace had to wrestle."

Three weeks after drawing bipartisan criticism for his frequent interruptions and badgering of his Democratic rival, Mr Trump adopted a more subdued tone for much of Thursday’s debate.

Mr Trump took to asking Ms Welker for the opportunity to follow up on Democratic nominee Joe Biden's answers. "If I may?" he asked, rather than just jumping in.

From the first question, this debate seemed different from round one, when Mr Trump's incessant interruptions and flouting of time limits derailed the 90-minute contest from the outset.

The mics had been muted as part of new measures introduced by the nonpartisan commission that oversees US presidential debates to help moderators "maintain order.”

Both Mr Biden and Mr Trump thanked Ms Welker at the end of the debate, with the president telling the NBC host she did a “good job”.

During Thursday's debate, Mr Trump also told Ms Welker: "I respect very much the way you're handling this, I have to say."

Mr Wallace, who failed to keep order when the president and former vice president squared off on October, admitted he was "jealous." During Fox News' post-debate coverage, he said: "I would have liked to have been able to moderate that debate and to get a real exchange of views instead of hundreds of interruptions.”

Steve Scully of C-SPAN was due to moderate the second debate in Florida, but Mr Trump refused to agree to the digital format proposed in light of the president’s coronavirus diagnosis and so it was cancelled.