Given how energetically Fox News was trying to get Donald Trump to participate in the first Republican presidential debate — hosted by the channel this week — it was probably unintentional that Fox’s ad for the program reinforced Trump’s rationale for skipping it.
“To be this country’s next president,” Fox News host Bret Baier says as the spot reaches its conclusion, with co-host Martha MacCallum finishing the thought: “you only get one first impression.”
Baier himself had been part of the channel’s pressure campaign on Trump, with the New York Times reporting over the weekend that Trump giddily displayed an incoming call from the host to those dining with him at his golf club in New Jersey. And now here was Baier, arguing to prospective viewers that they needed to tune in to his program to learn about the candidates in the 2024 Republican field.
Which is exactly why Trump said he didn’t need to join in.
“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Sunday before offering a string of exaggerated assertions about that success. “I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!”
Despite the framing from Fox News and Trump, the point of a political debate isn’t simply to introduce candidates to the electorate. If that were the goal, television broadcasts could simply offer profiles of candidates and their positions. Instead, it’s theoretically to offer a contrast between those running for office, to allow candidates to argue why their positions (and candidacies) are superior to their opponents. In modern practice, this includes various disparagements and zingers that candidates hope will gain traction as clips on social media.
This is what Trump is sidestepping. His opponents are framing it as a mark of cowardice, that he’s afraid to enter the ring with them. That may be the case. But it is also certainly the case that Trump believes that there’s no need for him to engage with his opponents. He has the support of most likely primary voters at this point — more than 6 in 10 of them, according to new CBS News-YouGov polling — and enjoys an unusual amount of loyalty within that support.
Consider what happens when one of Trump’s opponents invariably offers an attack on him during that debate. There’s former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, for example, distilling the anti-Trump case into a bite-size clip that circulates on social media. Trump has as much time as he wants to come up with a response or two, while insisting that it was easy to attack him when he wasn’t there. No risk of being caught onstage flat-footed as he stands next to unknowns like North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. And his base of support won’t even blink.
Trump has mastered the process of keeping his supporters loyal. Gimmicks like skipping the debate appear elsewhere, too. Last week, you’ll recall, he announced that he would respond to the new indictment out of Georgia by presenting a lengthy report documenting alleged fraud in that state in the 2020 election. Any such report would unquestionably be laden with garbage, since there was no significant documented fraud in that state in that election. Endless reviews, by the state and by outside actors, have failed to document any such activity. Georgia even filed suit against the organization True the Vote for its failure to validate its claims of absentee ballot fraud — claims that Trump continues to embrace and elevate.
On Friday, Trump reversed his plan to prove this nonexistent fraud.
A lot of people want to be conned in this way. Mein Kampf, of all places, was the first place I had this explained to me and got it. Like Trump, Hitler was genuinely very stupid, but he had this weird innate ability to tap into that side of people’s psychology, and look where it got him. He explained it in the book: The people don’t want democracy. They have jobs, they’re busy with things, they don’t have a good grasp of what’s going on, they don’t feel qualified to be put in charge of the country. They want someone to stand up and lead them and tell them what’s what and say they’re going to take care of things and it’s going to be good. Their reaction, internally, is going to be to relax. Oh, thank god, I was really worried because things are bad and I don’t know what to do. Now along comes this guy who can fix it and wants to take charge. Finally.
I don’t feel that that’s true of everybody, but a certain segment of the population really wanted someone like Hitler or Trump to come along. A lot of the GOP voters have hated all these mealy Mitch McConnell limp-wristers for decades now. That’s why they fell in love with Trump. He is, finally, what they wanted.