The Elephant Not in the Room

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Mike Pence’s former chief of staff made his pre-show rounds in the Milwaukee Bucks’ players’ parking garage, glad-handing reporters and offering sunny assessments of the ex-Vice President’s place in the field. The leading NeverTrumpers hosted reporters for plates of nachos and polling chatter. The candidates’ records got scratched and dinged, their characters prodded in front of a national audience. 

On the surface, Wednesday night’s first presidential debate of the 2024 political cycle had all of the approximations of a normal clash of White House hopefuls.

But this was not what any professional would consider a normal presidential debate. At times, the evening in Milwaukee felt like an elaborate cosplay of colorful characters instead of candidates with real prospects—a cast that could cost donors billions of dollars and still be all for naught. The scene was made particularly unreal by the fact that the field’s leader, the currently quadrupably-indicted former President Donald Trump, deemed his eight rivals too puny to merit a conversation and instead gave an interview to dismissed Fox News host Tucker Carlson about his critics who want to kill him, whether he thinks Jeffrey Epstein truly killed himself, and if the country is heading to a civil war. In a matter of hours,Trump is due in Atlanta to surrender and be photographed on criminal charges stemming from his alleged attempts to circumvent election results in Georgia in the days after his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Even pre-recorded and off-site, Trump remained the dominant force in Republican politics; he didn’t have to even show up to spark some of the most intense exchanges of the evening and to dominate the conversation. Just because the hosts and candidates alike wanted to treat Trump like the Republican Lord Voldemort—he who must not be named—for the first half of the session, it was impractical to think it possible. Sure, the candidates discussed Trump’s four years in the White House, but it took a full 51 minutes for Trump’s indictments to come up. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson launched the conversation but quickly faded to the background, as he had for most of the night. Fox had a camera at the ready outside the Fulton County, Ga., complex where Trump is due to be booked on Thursday.

“The elephant not in the room,” Fox News anchor and debate moderator Bret Baier called Trump. It drew boos, but Baier powered through repeated attempts to end the conversation. “Let’s just get through this section,” he pleaded with the audience. 

When reminded that part of the deal to get on the stage was to commit to the Republican Party that they would support the eventual nominee, only Hutchinson and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie indicated they wouldn’t support Trump if he’s the nominee and convicted in one of his criminal cases. 

Christie wagged his finger and shook his finger. “Someone has got to stop normalizing this conduct,” said Christie. “Booing is allowed, but it doesn’t change the truth.”

Only first-time candidate Vivek Ramaswamy seemed enthusiastic about defending Trump even if convicted of any of his charges, saying Trump “was the best President of the 21st century. It's a fact.”

Others, including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and DeSantis blamed “weaponization” of the Justice Department for going after Trump. 

That wasn’t the only moment the candidates invoked Trump. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s role in the Trump-era spending bills came under question; he later defended his decision to end Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote on Jan. 6, 2021. Former Ambassador Nikki Haley, nominated to the U.N. envoy role by Trump, turned on her former boss in an early sign she came polished perhaps better than anyone else on the stage: “Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our national debt,” she said, while other candidates trained their economic attacks on Joe Biden.

But Trump’s thumbprint on the GOP is undeniable. “It is not morning in America,” Ramaswamy said, belittling Reagan-era rhetoric. “We live in a dark moment. We have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal, sort of cold culture civil war. You need to recognize that in order to actually win.” In a further nod to Trumpian isolationism, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would decrease Ukraine aid to defend against Russia’s war. (Ramaswamy, too, wanted to pull back U.S. dollars and support from Kyiv.) “I will have Europe pull their weight,” DeSantis said in an echo of Trump’s position on NATO.

That doesn’t mean anyone was really willing to concede this reality: Trump is so far ahead in the polls, he may be unreachable and he may never need to show up for these sessions. “Would you name me a single political person who is not an imbecile who would say, ‘You know what, you have a 60-point lead. Why don’t you go against someone who is at 1 percent, less than 1 percent—give him three hours, two hours, whatever it may be—give him unfettered access to try to land a strike? That doesn’t make sense,” the former President’s son Donald Trump Jr. told reporters in Milwaukee after the debate, saying Fox officials told him he couldn’t go into the official spin room. (Even so, he burst into the reporters’ workspace nearby and held forth.) It was a reminder that nothing involving Trump ever hews to political norms.

Instead, Trump’s rivals tried to treat the evening like any other debate with the same rules in place, relying perhaps on some wishful thinking: “I think the Trump campaign is making a big mistake by not being here. They are my loser tonight,” said Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who was talking with the crowd ahead of the debate. (Kemp, remember, rejected Trump’s entreaties to overturn the then-President’s loss in Georgia.)

But taking down Trump on the road to 2024 is going to be a tough task. It comes with tremendous risk, especially given Trump’s popularity inside the Republican Party. Even when given a chance to answer whether there ought to be a mental and physical fitness test for the Oval Office, the candidates immediately spotted that the question wasn’t just about 80-year-old Biden but also 77-year-old Trump. “The American people can make those judgments,” Pence said.

Frontrunners, of course, stumble. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani started as the Republican candidate to defeat in 2007 and he arrived at the party’s nominating convention in the Twin Cities with exactly zero delegates. That same year, Hillary Clinton led in all but one but one public poll before a third-place finish in Iowa put her inevitability in question; she conceded the Democratic race in June. 

But sometimes, the race plays out the way it’s expected to. In the march toward the 2000 GOP nomination, Texas Gov. George W. Bush never once lost his lead in public polling before he clinched the nomination. Eight years later, Mitt Romney led for most of his second bid for the White House before he lost in the general election. 

Trump looks a whole lot more like Bush than Giuliani right now—despite the latter’s shared indictment in Georgia. That doesn’t mean those on the stage were happy about it. “Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We cannot win a general election that way,” Haley said. But unless—or until—the rest of the GOP realizes this truth, the Republican Party may well hand Biden a second term.

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