Donald Trump may skip the GOP primary debates:
Former President Donald J. Trump used a campaign rally on Thursday in New Hampshire to add to his arguments that it was not worth his time to debate his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, casting himself as the party’s undeclared nominee.
He said that giving his G.O.P. rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, an opening on a debate stage made no sense.
“Why would you do that?” he told the crowd at a DoubleTree hotel in Manchester.
Three thoughts about that:
1. I’m kind of fine with Trump skipping the debates. Remember the first Biden-Trump debate of 2020?
Donald Trump doesn’t treat debates as a place to debate the issues and their merits. He treats them as theater displays, as wrestling matches, as opportunities to demonstrate his alpha male dominance. That first Biden-Trump debate in 2020 was one of the low points of that execrable year. I don’t need to see him contending with GOP wannabes to know who he is and what he’s about.
2. While the NYT story mentions DeSantis, I suspect that Trump’s stance has more to do with avoiding Chris Christie — or at least cutting Christie’s possible not-quite-real presidential campaign off at the knees. Christie, after all, sees himself as a possible Trump destroyer, but only if the two get on stage together.
Christie challenged Republicans to find someone who can do to Trump “what I did to Marco” Rubio — a callback to his 2016 debate-stage evisceration of the Republican senator from Florida — “because that’s the only thing that’s going to defeat” Trump.
“You have to be fearless, because he will come back — and right at you,” Christie said. “And that means you need to think about who’s got the skill to do that, and who’s got the guts to do that, because it’s not going to end nicely.”
Christie can only make this kind of attack — if he really is capable of making it at this point — if he’s on stage with Trump. If there’s no debate, there’s no real reason for Christie to even get into the race. Trump probably understands that.
3. I’m not sure how I feel about presidential debates at either the primary or general election anyway. If Trump sees the debates as “theater displays, as wrestling matches, as opportunities to demonstrate his alpha male dominance,” well, that’s because that’s what they often are — even in “normal” times, what we mostly learn from these encounters is whose staff is better at preparing pre-planned zingers for use during the debate. How often do we learn something genuinely new and important? Especially when you have more than, say, three candidates on stage?
I’d rather scrap debates for individual town halls — bring in the voters, let them ask questions directly. Let them size up a candidate and talk about the issues they want to talk about. I suspect we’d learn more. And there would be less opportunity for alpha male strutting.
I like this town hall idea. I dimly recall enjoying a presidential debate like that where Clinton and Dole took questions from the audience.