The Empty Podium

A Preview of the Dumbest Debate

I don’t know whether the Fox producers and the debate hosts have the sense of fun and irony to leave an empty podium on the stage representing Donald Trump in Wednesday night’s debate in Milwaukee, but it hardly signifies. The one candidate who matters in the Republican primary won’t be on stage, rendering the entire exercise moot. 

Every candidate on that stage has a cadre of supporters making the case that GOP voters will finally see the sterling qualities and shining parts of their candidate.

Good luck.

9/11 denier Vivek Ramamswamy, anti-woke mullah Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott (R-Larry Ellison), and Nikki Haley will make a case for why they’re the next Trump, the logical heir to the American First movement.

They will find show no awareness of the MAGA base’s post-conservative, post-Republican, and post-decency turn to cruelty, conspiracy, violence, and the unlimited desire for state power to be applied to their enemies or of the disastrous electoral consequences chasing the MAGA dragon has had since 2016.

None will succeed. The Never Trump candidates -- Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson -- will try to knock the others for their blind obedience to the Donald and make their just-the-tip case that Trump needs to go. 

All of them need a knockout, but their real opponent will be in the comfortable embrace of Tucker Carlson, not in the ring with them. 

What you will -- and won’t -- hear in the debate gives you a clear picture of the futility of holding a Republican debate when Donald Trump dominates that party, the polling, and the primary at a level that no indictment seems to penetrate. 

For all that, the discussion will illustrate the coming Republican message campaign against Joe Biden for the 2024 race.

You will hear the disaster-porn version of the Biden Presidency. Every man and woman on that stage will describe America as a terrifying dystopia where the living envy the dead as they scrounge through the radioactive ruins of a once great nation.  They’ll describe the mirror-image of the actual economy in the most lurid and overdone terms, ignoring the glowing reality.

Expect a dramatic exercise in cherry-picking the few rough spots in the economy; it will take a skein of epic lies to pretend we haven’t added 13.2 million jobs -- 3.8 million more than since COVID struck. They’ll try to turn the lowest unemployment rate in 54 years into some kind of disaster story when the truth is that there are 1.6 jobs available for every remaining job-seeker. Manufacturing is soaring, but they’ll describe dying steel towns while ignoring the new chip fabs taking their

place.

They’ll try to turn the inflation rate -- dropping, but still painful -- into the central issue in the economic dialogue…even though every one of them on stage was on board for the massive Trump spending spree that led us here and not one of them supported the Inflation Reduction Act. 

They’ll try to sell the biggest item in the right’s catalog of imaginary demons to their Republican audience; the tired and phony trope that millions of vicious drug lords and gang members are flooding over the “open” border and dump trucks of fentanyl are parked outside every elementary school. Never mind that the Biden administration’s border policy is stopping more illegal immigrants and more drugs than Trump did with his chest-thumping “build duh Wall” stagecraft.

In an epic act of projection, expect the participants to bleat out an endless mantra of already-discredited MAGA Mad Libs; expect to hear “Biden Crime Family,” “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” and “weaponization of government” talking points from all of them.

What’s the throughline for all these messages? Each one is a sad, small echo of Trump’s own bluster and swagger. Each one is speaking not to America’s highest and best ideals or to Republicans ready for a real shift from Trump. It’s all MAGA red meat and pitiful agitprop.

Finally, you’ll hear every single person on that stage pledge to support Donald Trump if he is the Republican nominee. They know that even if Trump was by some miracle swept from the political field, his base will continue to demand fealty to Trump’s person and legacy. They’ll promise to pardon him. They’ll promise to destroy the DOJ top-to-bottom. They’ll pretend the conspiracy to overthrow America’s 2020 election Trump led was a mere nothing and that his tidal wave of legal disasters is the act of the iniquitous Deep State. 

The things you won’t hear are just as important.

While Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie will stand on the stage and make their critiques of Trump clear, neither will take the stand that would prove their moral position on Trump once and for all. Neither will say, “The case I’ve made against Trump is so clear and decisive that I could obviously never vote for him, even if he wins the Republican nomination.”  

That’s the fatal flaw of the handful of Never Trump candidates running in 2024; they’re really “Sometimes Trump” candidates…and that time is November of 2024. The man they call amoral, criminal, disastrous, and dangerous is, in their minds, a better bet than Joe Biden in 2024. It points to the rot deep inside the GOP, even those who find Trump unacceptable, and this debate will do little to change the course of the primary or the Party’s Trumpian future.