RNC Knew Trump Would Bone Primary Debates, Did Nothing Anyway
'Why bother trying?' is a hell of a strategy.
The Republican National Committee is holding its first presidential primary debate tonight (don’t forget to join us here at Wonkette!), but they forgot to book their likely nominee. Whoops! Donald Trump refuses to participate, and while I hate to agree with that oozing moral pustule, he’s currently leading every poll by double digits and has nothing to gain from attending.
His opponents have mostly refused to directly criticize his presidency or his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Spineless candidates such as Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and free-falling Ron DeSantis just assume that Trump will vanish on his own and they can win the sloppy seconds prize.
This entire primary has been a Trump-less debate. Now, it’s official.
The RNC knew this outcome was inevitable more than a year ago, back when Trump’s rap sheet was clean if not his conscience. The lucky bastards charged with planning the first Republican primary debates since 2016 worried that Trump might bail if Fox News was the host. They’d even recently considered banning him from all future debates if he didn’t show up for the first one. Ultimately, they exercised the better part of cowardice and did nothing.
“Early in the debate process we talked about it,” one of the RNC members involved told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive internal conversations.
After one of the members asked what the RNC should do if Trump wanted to pick and choose which debates to attend, the consensus in the room boiled down to “America is full of freedoms, and this is one of those,” the member said.
That anonymous RNC member boasts such wisdom yet they live among us common people. This member also said that tonight’s Trump-less debate “could be the biggest Republican shit show we’ve seen in years.” We can assume they were around during the 2016 debates that Trump dominated and personally overhauled from sleepy CSPAN tea party to raucous WWE smackdown.
Trump’s antics were the main attraction, as Politico recalls in its feature this week, “Remember ‘small hands’ and the menstruation taunts? Looking back at Trump’s biggest GOP debate moments.” (I’d rather not.)
Trump is no longer the upstart outsider. He might’ve needed to show up for debates so he could humiliate Jeb Bush, but that was then. Now, he’d rather swap pro-Putin talking points with Tucker Carlson.
The RNC, under the horrible leadership of Ronna McDaniel, has stood by while Trump transformed the party into a MAGA cult of personality. RNC members can talk about how their goal is to “beat Biden,” but the MAGA faithful see that as merely an ancillary objective to putting Trump back in the White House.
“Trump has uniquely broken what it means to be the Republican National Committee because he's broken what it means to be a Republican,” a source close to the RNC told The Daily Beast.
“I don’t necessarily mean either of those things negatively,” they continued. “It’s just that, do you think a blue collar Trump supporter in the heartland cares one bit about the RNC’s role as some sort of ‘clearing house’ for who’s a legitimate, viable Republican presidential candidate? Of course not.”
This makes any sort of debate or truly competitive primary a farce. Trump was always willing to burn down the party if he didn’t win, but unlike 2016, there is no serious possibility that he won’t clinch the nomination. The RNC required candidates to sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee, as a condition for debate qualification. Trump refused, of course, yet even anti-Trump former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson willingly signed, ensuring he’ll either break his word or surrender his soul.
One RNC member bitterly, if accurately, predicted that Trump will win tonight’s debate simply “because he’s not there,” but another member insists “at some point when he starts to fade in the polls, he'll have to scramble, and eventually come back.”
That’s some King George-level delusion.
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"because he's broken what it means to be a Republican,”
Nah, I'd say he's brought what it means to be a Rethuglican right out into the open!
Well, this is the problem when your likely nominee is Schrödinger's candidate.
He is both the winner of the 2020 election and not President right now.
He is both a candidate for 2024 and unable to run because of the 14th amendment.
He has a re-election campaign fund that is, at the same time, a campaign fund and a personal piggy bank for legal fees and personal expenses.
He is both the party's nominee and someone who likely can't serve because he may be in prison by the time he wins (if he wins).
He is both a tettering old man that could drop dead from a heart attack before the election and a SUPER HEALTHY GENIUS GOD-BEING that will be the savior of us all (if by "us" you mean white nationalist racist trash).