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To be clear, Donald Trump isn’t guaranteed to win the Republican nomination for the presidency for the third time in 2024.
But the easy ride he got in the GOP’s first primary debate Wednesday night − without even bothering to show up on the Milwaukee stage − underscored the reality that the only person likely to cost Trump the nomination is Trump, as the repercussion of some health or legal or other catastrophe. At least at the moment, that sort of political lightning looms as a bigger risk to him than the prospect that one of the rivals on stage is going to be able to consolidate enough support to be a threat.
The exchanges in the raucous two-hour debate on Fox News, moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, trained most of the political fire on first-time candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in particular took on the brash 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur for his lack of experience, his opposition to Ukraine aid, and his dismissal of the rest of the field on stage as pols who had been “bought and paid for.”
Haley, who served in the Trump administration as UN ambassador, raised one of the rare voices against the former president. She criticized him for adding trillions to the national debt while in the White House and warned that he wasn’t electable. “We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America,” she said.
It was as though most of the other contenders were living in an alternative universe, one in which Trump didn’t command a lead of more than 40 percentage points in the Republican race, according to an average of national polls aggregated by realclearpolitics.com. His nearest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is at 14% and falling. Ramaswamy is third at 7% and rising.
That might traditionally prompt a frontrunner’s challengers to take him on. Instead, DeSantis (who didn’t get the “pile-on” of attacks that his aides had predicted beforehand) avoided tackling Trump by name, though he pointedly contrasted his record of handling the Covid pandemic with Washington’s response. Ramaswamy called Trump “the best president of the 21st century.” Pence, whose life was threatened by pro-Trump rioters on the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, said more than once that he was “incredibly proud of the Trump-Pence administration.”
And when the candidates were asked if they would support Trump as the nominee if he was convicted of a crime, only former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson didn’t raise his hand, although Chris Christie joked that he was only wagging his finger. When the former New Jersey governor then called Trump’s behavior “beneath the office of the president of the United States,” he was drowned out by a round of boos from the audience.
Nearly an hour passed before a question was posed about what Baier called “the elephant not in the room”−that is, the fact that Trump now faces 91 criminal charges that include obstructing justice, mishandling some of the nation’s most sensitive documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump was slated to turn himself in to the Fulton County jail in Atlanta Thursday to be arrested and processed on the latest indictment, in Georgia.
Instead of joining the debate, Trump had taped a rambling interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he boasted about his achievements in office and attacked Joe Biden. With his formidable lead, he had said there was no need for him to participate in the debate, though that carried the risk he wouldn’t be there to defend himself if attacked.
As it turned out, that wasn’t a big problem.
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