Mike Wallace was fearless in tracking people down and asking them jaw-dropping questions on "60 Minutes" — and his son, Chris, a veteran Fox News anchor is expected to be just as tough when he moderates the first highly anticipated Republican primary debate on Thursday.
"I certainly think my style is adversarial," Wallace said in an interview with
The Washington Post.
And for any of the 10 GOP candidates who'll be duking it out on stage don't believe that, Wallace has a binder full of zingers ready to go.
"I've got some doozies in there," Wallace, who'll moderate along with Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly, told the Post's Krissah Thompson.
Each moderator is expected to ask about 22 questions to each of the 10 candidates — queries that are first tested out in so-called "murder boards," sessions in which they are refined and streamlined for maximum punch.
According to the Post, Wallace is "thinking a lot" about Donald Trump, who tops the latest polls and remains far ahead of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
"He's a big wild card, because you don't know how he's going to react," Wallace told the newspaper.
Wallace also says the billionaire developer "wants to go after people. And you can be sure there will be a moment — whether it's in my questioning or Bret's or Megyn's, where somebody is going to give him a fat juicy ball right in there so he can go after Bush and see how he responds to it. It's sort of like playing three-dimensional checkers."
He says of Bush, "If you're Jeb Bush, you pretty much want to stay out of any clinches … There's nothing to be gained by him to punch down on somebody below him."
"What he's going to want to do is establish his conservative bona fides, to say: 'I'm not Bush III, I'm the former conservative governor of a state' . . . There are other people who are going to want to make a statement on the stage, who are going to want to push at somebody, and to a certain degree, you'd like those fireworks."
The debate airs on the Fox News Channel, Thursday at 9 p.m. ET.
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