Wednesday night’s Republican debate on Fox News — the first of the 2024 election cycle — ended up, perhaps predictably, feeling like the undercard. After all, it isn’t just that the frontrunner for…
After all, it isn’t just that the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president,, wasn’t on the stage, by his own choice. It’s that, since his appearance at the equivalent first-of-the-cycle debate on Fox News in 2015, Trump has set the agenda for the party and, perhaps, the network. And he hasn’t ceded the stage, even as he won’t, now, appear on it.
This inclusion of a live prison shot felt like Fox giving candidates the rope to hang a past president, one who may have fallen out of favor on the network even before he decided to skip their debate. And yet it wasn’t taken, really: As to the question of whether the 2020 election was legitimately decided, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was among the several who said that former Vice President Mike Pence “did the right thing” by refusing to overturn the results of the election.
But it was Trump who loomed large, both for a suite of candidates who were denied the opportunity to test their strength against the obvious frontrunner and for a network that still needs him, even as it, too, is ready to move on. Each candidate seemed hard-pressed to present themself as the grown-up alternative to the past several years of Republican politics.
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