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Republicans fell right into the Trump trap.
In hindsight, Donald Trump’s skipping of multiple GOP primary forums and a debate in 2016 turned out to be a key milestone in his domination of the Republican Party.
These moments didn’t just set Trump apart from his Republican peers in a showy way, much to his liking. They also set a precedent for Trump to spurn future debates while appearing rebellious to his followers, rather than merely incompetent. And conservative media played into the tactic by covering Trump’s counterprogramming events anyway, dampening any negative impact his absences could have caused.
Republicans have largely fed this strategy — and Trump’s hypersensitivity to criticism — even more in recent years. This was the case when many of them supported Trump’s decision to skip a virtual debate with Joe Biden in 2020, and when the Republican National Committee voted last year to bar its party’s presidential nominees from participating in general election debates sanctioned by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
Now, the chickens have come home to roost for the GOP. On multiple occasions last week, Trump threatened not to participate in the upcoming presidential primary debates, and he questioned why someone with his level of support should want to participate in the first place. In response, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel effectively threw up her hands.
“That’s his choice,” McDaniel said Sunday in a Fox News interview, adding that “every candidate’s going to make that calculation.”
Ordinarily, coming from a party chair, that might sound like a threat. Or, at minimum, a legitimate warning about the pitfalls of skipping a chance to speak to voters. In this case, it sounds like a powerless admission from a party official who knows that the debates have effectively become a formality with Trump in the mix.
Trump’s refusal to participate would effectively rid Republicans — at least those looking to dislodge the former president from his role as the party’s standard-bearer — of any real chance to hold his feet to the fire in public.
Said McDaniel: “What I think is, the American people want to see these candidates, they want to see what they’re articulating, and especially: What is your plan to take us out of the misery of Joe Biden?”
Trump is still claiming he won the 2020 election, which he legitimately lost by millions of votes. He clearly doesn’t care what “the people” want. That said, he appears to be right about one thing: Given his overwhelming support among conservatives in recent polls, it begs the question about whether participating in primary debates serves him any good.
For years, Republicans have portrayed Trump as a figure who is larger than life. They can’t be surprised he now thinks he’s bigger than the party and its electoral processes.