Even in absence, Trump casts a long shadow over Republican debate

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He wasn’t there. And yet he was.

He was in the answers about the economy. He was in the language about the Deep State. He was the target of blistering criticism, even on Washington spending during his administration.

His shadow was long – every candidate on Wednesday’s Republican debate stage referred to him or his signature issues – and the themes were his: American decline, immigration, China, political correctness, homelessness and crime rates in Democratic-ruled cities. One of the candidates, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, even employed the signature Trump critique of climate change: “hoax.”

Donald Trump’s name was written in invisible ink in many of the prepared ripostes. His image was constantly referenced subliminally. Eight presidential candidates debated and the ninth remains the likely winner of the nomination – despite the hopes, hype and hokum delivered afterwards in the post-debate spin room, which was so full of spin that it resembled nothing so much as an all-night launderette on the South Side of Milwaukee.

And yet all the candidates manoeuvred to move away from the former president as part of their effort to wrest the nomination away from him.

Wednesday’s Fiserv Forum session had the air of a Wimbledon semi-final for the chance to play Novak Djokovic at Centre Court, an NFC Championship Game conducted for the opportunity to face the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, the penultimate round of the Women’s World Cup for the chance to go head-to-head with England in the final.

Let the sports metaphors flow: this was what boxing impresarios would call the undercard, or just as apt, the Underdog Derby.

Every underdog has her day. Wednesday may have gone to Nikki Haley, who melded experience and independence, and emerged as the most ardent skeptic of Mr. Trump and the most sophisticated voice on world affairs.

Another may have been Mr. Ramaswamy, fluent and articulate but perhaps too combative. He stressed his role as an outsider, a favourite challenger profile from Andrew Jackson (1824) to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (1976), and he scored rhetorical points when he described his rivals as “puppets” of political-action committees, more interested in “incremental reform” than in “revolution.”

That prompted former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey to describe him as an “amateur” who sounded as if his answers were scripted by ChatGPT and led former vice-president Mike Pence to say that this was “not the time for on-the-job training.”

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, generally regarded as Mr. Trump’s strongest challenger, appeared pugnacious and polished, perhaps the effect of having been prepared by a top Republican debate coach, Brett O’Donnell.

The candidates sparred over Ukraine and immigration, but perhaps the greatest drama occurred over the effort of Mr. Trump to overturn the 2020 election. The latest Iowa Poll, released this week in the states with the first presidential test of the 2024 political season, showed that 51 per cent of likely Republican caucus-goers believed Mr. Trump’s claims that he won the 2020 election.

Mr. Christie continued his assault on the former president, saying, “Someone’s got to stop normalizing [Mr. Trump’s] conduct. Whether or not you believe the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of the president of the United States.”

Ms. Haley, former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, called Mr. Trump “the most disliked politician in America.” And Mr. Pence widened the distance between him and the president he served, saying of Mr. Trump’s demands he take steps to keep him in the presidency, “He asked me to put him over the Constitution, and I chose the Constitution.”

“Trump produced the most rambunctious segment of the debate,” Vincent Benigni, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, said in an interview as the debate was being conducted. “A few of them have moved from Trump, and that probably surprised a lot of viewers. But overall Trump came away pretty well. He was the oxygen of the debate.”

But with Mr. Trump on an internet interview with former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, the session was dutiful, even dull. It was not, in a word, a circus. Even children grow weary of the human cannonball act, the dancing bears and the flying trapeze tricks under the big top, and so do mature adults – and mature nations. (For those desperate for the rush that comes with a Trump fix, he told Mr. Carlson that his liberal and press opponents were “savage animals, they’re people that are sick.”)

The question, beyond who profited from the two-hour session, is whether these sorts of debates matter. They surely do in the general-election; John F. Kennedy arguably won the presidency (1960) because of debates, and two incumbents, Gerald Ford (1976) and Mr. Carter (1980), lost their chances to continue in the White House. In nomination fights, the verdict is less certain, with clarity usually coming weeks or months later, if at all; that’s why, in retrospect, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s triumph in the 1968 California primary over Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota is sometimes attributed in part to his debate performance.

Similarly, a routine 1981 American college baseball game between Yale University and St. John’s University in New Haven, Conn., might have been lost in obscurity were it not for what we learned later about the pitchers. So the mystery lingers: might there have been a Ron Darling or a Frank Viola – the future major-league pitching stars who faced each other in that game – there on the stage Wednesday night? We won’t know for sure for months.