There were at least a few engaging subplots in the first GOP debate last month in Milwaukee — notably, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s poise and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s obnoxiousness. But the second one Wednesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library amounted to little more than a blur.
Trump opted to be 2,300 miles away, speaking at a car-parts facility near Detroit and warning striking United Auto Workers that while they are negotiating for higher wages and benefits, “environmental lunatics” were going to permanently eliminate their jobs. Trump and President Biden, who had walked the picket line Tuesday, are battling for the blue-collar workers who could determine the 2024 outcome in closely fought swing states of the Upper Midwest.
That left the seven candidates on the stage here talking over each other and repeating shopworn lines from their stump speeches. For most of the night, there was little by way of substantive engagement with each other or — more important — any explanation of why any of them would be a better alternative than the former president, who currently leads all of them by more than 40 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. The most pointed exchanges came in the second hour — in one withering retort, Haley told Ramaswamy “every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber” — after many viewers could have been forgiven for moving on.
Sure, they also made a few halfhearted criticisms of the fact that Trump was not there. “Donald Trump hides behind the walls of his golf clubs and won’t show up here to answer questions like all the rest of us are up here to answer,” former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said.
For its part, the Trump campaign sent out an email blast declaring the debate to be “boring and inconsequential,” and calling upon the Republican National Committee to “immediately put an end” to any further ones so the party can train its energy on defeating Biden.
Predictably, given the setting, the candidates over and over invoked the legacy and principles of Reagan. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pointed out that Republicans have lost three elections in a row and echoed Reagan’s famous line that this is “a time for choosing.”
But all that did was serve to remind that today’s Republican Party would be all but unrecognizable to the 40th president, who among other things was a staunch advocate of immigration, was unafraid of the word “amnesty” and signed a landmark law that legalized nearly 3 million.
“We’re no longer in a position to do that anymore,” Christie said.
Reagan was also an effective debater, who well understood these events to be an opportunity to connect with voters on a visceral level. In 1980, he effectively extinguished Jimmy Carter’s reelection chances by turning to the television cameras and closing their debate with a question to voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
At some point, somebody among Trump’s primary opponents may find a way to show that kind of boldness against the leader of their own party — to point out the damage that he has done to the country and to democracy itself in the past eight years. But it’s hard to see how that can happen on a debate stage Trump isn’t standing on, which is all you need to know about why the former president wasn’t there.
Meanwhile, the rest of the field will just continue to underscore their own irrelevance. Their own time for choosing is rapidly running out.
