Well folks, we have arrived. The 2024 election season officially kicked off last night at the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, with eight candidates vying for the nomination taking the stage. None of those candidates, however, was front-runner Donald Trump, who’s been dominating his rivals and held a 23-point lead over his nearest contender, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, in an Iowa caucus poll released earlier this week. Barring some kind of miracle, Trump, who claims he’ll skip all the debates, will almost certainly be the nominee. (Yes, even though he’s been indicted four times and will be caught up in trials for much of next year). Without him on the Fox News-hosted debate stage, last night’s showdown was a pointless contest for second place, and a stark reminder that the GOP is the party of Trump, no matter how many Chris Christies and Asa Hutchinsons try their best to change it.
The former New Jersey Governor and former Arkansas Governor were among the Republican hopefuls last night who passed the polling and individual donor threshold required to qualify for the debate. They were joined by DeSantis, ex-Trump VP Mike Pence, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Each one tried to define themselves amid the veritable clown car, some with more success than others. Ramaswamy, who’s been experiencing a small surge in the polls of late and has positioned himself as the Trump-esque outsider, put on the most fiery performance, sparring with Pence and Christie, vowing to abandon Ukraine, and declaring early on that climate change is a hoax. (Sadly, he did not do any ‘just asking questions about 9/11’ on the debate stage, but there’s always next time.)
Haley, who I keep forgetting is even running, pitched herself as a conservative voice of reason in a more reactionary climate. DeSantis focused on his “anti-woke”, alleged pro-business record in Florida and channeled Biden’s 2019 Corn Pop moment by telling a dubious story about someone named Penny who was left in a pan (???) as an infant. Pence got angry and quoted the Bible. Burgum, uh, was there.
Moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum hit all the typical Republican hot points — the economy, the war in Ukraine, homelessness and crime, education, and abortion, which forced every candidate to dance around whether or not they support a federal ban. (DeSantis, who quietly signed a six-week ban into law in his home state in April, refused to say whether or not he’d support similar federal restrictions, which the Democrats would be smart to wield against him over and over again.)
Trump’s explosive conduct, presidential record, and mounting legal woes did come up — more on that shortly. Still, for two hours, the candidates were able to exist in a world where their policies and personalities (or lack thereof) got their 15 minutes, without the “elephant not in the room,” as the moderators described him, around to stomp on everyone and suck up all the airtime. It must have felt nice for them.
And yet, none of that really matters. None of it matters! Trump’s going to trounce these people in the primary without having to field any direct challenges to his record or offer a single substantial campaign promise. He is coded into the GOP’s DNA, something that was palpable last night even without him onstage. Fox News opened the debate with pre-taped imagery from the 2020 George Floyd protests and a clip from country singer Oliver Anthony’s hit anti-woke ballad, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The network is still in thrall to the man who sailed down a golden escalator in 2015, propelling the Freedom Caucus to even further extremes and helping spew the semi-fascist woke wars that put people like DeSantis in the spotlight.
And when you watch each candidate dance their way around a question, or mumble a few platitudes, or flash their off-putting smiles, you can see why Trump appeals to people. He’s charismatic, he talks to voters instead of around them, and he doesn’t spend too much time on signature Republican policies, because these policies aren’t even broadly popular. There’s not much difference between, “I alone can fix it,” and some of the vague campaign promises that made their way to the debate stage last night, but one is simple enough to sound definitive. Sure, Trump’s jokes are cruel and he’s a self-obsessed nativist charlatan with an accumulating rap sheet that’s putting War and Peace to shame, but if you stuck him on a stage with the rest of this crew, I’d wager he’d put on a much better show.
Not that the other candidates didn’t try. The Republican debates might briefly lead you to believe that the party’s mostly moved on from Trump, but last night, at least a few people were auditioning to be his right-hand man. When asked whether or not they’d support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he is convicted of one of his many alleged crimes, everybody but Christie and Hutchinson, who’ve been pleading with their party to move away from Trumpism, promised to stick with their guy.
The candidates dismissed Trump’s criminal charges as if they were a decades-old shoplifting allegation, and not, say, a massive alleged election fraud conspiracy for which Trump is literally surrendering in Fulton County, Georgia today. Ramaswamy in particular caped for Trump, calling him the “best president of the 21st century” and railing against the “party in power us[ing] police force to indict political opponents.” Things got even more heated in a discussion over whether or not Pence did the right thing by not helping Trump overthrow the election on January 6. Even DeSantis, Trump’s biggest rival at the moment, couldn’t give a straight answer. Even if Trump had been onstage, he probably wouldn’t have had to do much to defend himself.
And Trump knows it. While the debate was underway in Milwaukee, Trump was streaming on X, formerly known as Twitter, doing a pre-taped interview with former Fox darling Tucker Carlson. In addition to talking about all the “love” and “unity” on display during the violent January 6 insurrection and musing over whether or not there might be a civil war, he laid into his fellow contenders and the purportedly anti-Trump powers-that-be at Fox News with typical Trumpian zeal.
“You see the polls have come out, I’m leading by 50 and 60 points,” Trump said, calling DeSantis, “donezo,” Christie a “savage maniac,” and claiming he was “disappointed” in his own former VP. “And some of them are at one and zero and two. And I’m saying, ‘Do I sit there for an hour or two hours, whatever it's going to be and get harassed by people that shouldn't even be running for president? Should I be doing that? And a network that isn't particularly friendly to me, frankly.”
This debate did nothing to convince Trump to show up for the next one, and it did even less to stymie the increasingly inevitable 2020 Biden vs. Trump repeat on the horizon. And yet, we’re still going to have to do this again at the second Republican presidential debate in September. Sad!
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
