Donald Trump will be present by his absence Wednesday night in Milwaukee. Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the others who hope to wrest the Republican nomination from him not only will walk a minefield when attempting to criticize the former president; they cannot even escape his shadow when he sits in another state.
A quadrennial tradition sees presidential aspirants debating. Donald Trump, as he does with many customs, bucks that tradition.
In doing so, he follows another one: When you run comfortably ahead in the polls, do not allow the people beneath you to stand on your level on a stage before the electorate.
Lyndon B. Johnson refused to debate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Richard Nixon, comfortably ahead of Hubert Humphrey until an 11th-hour surge in which the vice president siphoned off many George Wallace voters, balked at debating in 1968. Ditto for 1972 when he cruised to a 49-state landslide. Nota bene: Johnson and Nixon rebuffed a general election debate, and Trump merely skips an intramural forum helping to sort out the Republican nomination.
Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Carter (after some gamesmanship) debated Ronald Reagan in 1980, because the incumbents feared losing, which they did. By the time Reagan debated Walter Mondale in 1984 — and muffed some answers in debate one that brought about one of the great lines in presidential debate history in the second contest — a debate felt obligatory.
Presidential debates amount to not so much an American tradition as a TV tradition. It came as no coincidence that the first presidential debate in American history occurred in 1960, when nine in every 10 households owned a television. William McKinley did not debate William Jennings Bryan. Martin Van Buren never debated William Henry Harrison. But we imagine they did because television makes us think that what we experienced through pixels our forebears experienced somehow, too.
Donald Trump, who generally performs well in debates — with his first encounter with Joe Biden a Hindenburg exception — possibly will win the debate by no-showing tonight in Milwaukee. He allows eight candidates who want to beat him to instead beat each other up. Specifically, without the frontrunner present, they aim to make a piñata out of second-place Ron DeSantis, which is another way of saying that they unwittingly do Trump’s bidding. Should any of them vault ahead of the sickly pack, he has a plan for that, too. The former president will show up to post bail and pose for a mugshot in Georgia on Thursday, which surely blunts any momentum the debate winner may enjoy.
Neither Ron DeSantis nor Chris Christie nor Tim Scott plays the immediate major loser in this scenario. Fox News does. Trump equals ratings. His absence equals not so much a must-see debate as a Star Search competition for who may proceed under a brighter spotlight, only in this audition eight egos on the stage, rather than Statler and Waldorf armed with rotten tomatoes, eggs, and sacks of flour in the balcony, decide who continues. In other words, the ambiguity in who becomes the challenger for Trump emboldens those polling in the low single-digits to continue their ego trip — and continue helping Gulliver defeat the many Lilliputians.
Is there any doubt that Trump attracts more eyes in his conversation with Tucker Carlson, undoubtedly eager to stick it to his corporate overlords who unwisely dumped him, than do DeSantis and the seven dwarfs? This hurts Fox News.
The long-term loser? Donald Trump.
In bowing out of the primary debates, he gives Joe Biden an easy excuse to bow out of the general election debates. Katie Hobbs chickened out of debating Kari Lake during the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial campaign. This worked, as the Democrat won the general election.
Biden’s underwhelming intelligence, propensity to say idiotic or barely coherent things, and alleged senility make the debate stage the perfect place to showcase his disqualifiers before voters. Donald Trump, in taking his ball and going home from this and presumably other Republican debates, allows Joe Biden to weasel out of a general election debate without consequence. This surely imposes adverse consequences on Donald Trump should he become the Republican nominee for the third consecutive contest.
Undoubtedly, he devises a memorable one-liner, à la telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “because now I’m not president” earlier this year to rationalize an about-face on the debt-ceiling vote, to justify not debating his opponents but calling for a debate with the president. This cannot undo the self-inflicted damage, albeit belated damage as though from a time bomb, that giving the dullard-in-chief an excuse to play hooky on debates unleashes.
via spectator