No Debate: trump Was Lousy At It Anyway

In minor news today - since all the major news like Putin's genocide in Ukraine gets a bit overwhelming - the Republican Party voted this week to stop joining the 4-year farce of Presidential debating because as it turns out trump is too much of a pussy to risk it anymore. Well, that's MY take on it. Let's hear from the official reporting from Reuters (via The Guardian link):

The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying the group that has run the debates for decades was biased and refused to enact reforms.

“We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” the committee’s chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.

What McDaniel means by "bias," by the by, translates into "the moderators wouldn't let trump go bugfuck psycho like he wants to."

The move, which followed months of wrangling between the RNC and the commission, will potentially deprive voters of seeing Republican and Democratic candidates on the same stage.

Millions of Americans usually watch the presidential debates and many viewers say they help them to make up their minds about whom to vote for, according to research by Pew Research Center.

The RNC’s decision follows grievances aired by former president Donald Trump and other Republicans about the timing of debates, debate formats and the selection of moderators.

Defenders of the debates say they are an important element of the democratic process, but critics say they have become television spectacles in which viewers learn little about the candidates’ policies.

Trump refused to participate in what was supposed to be the second of three debates with Biden in 2020, after the commission switched it to a virtual contest following Trump’s Covid-19 infection.

What the article didn't mention was how the first debate between trump and Biden in 2020 turned out: A complete and utter disaster for trump. Don't take my word for it: Every other pundit who watched it were sickened by trump's bullying behavior. Here's the link back to what David Frum documented for The Atlantic:

Instead, he talked to Facebook conspiracists, to the angriest of ultra-Republican partisans, and to violent white supremacists. He urged the Proud Boys to “stand by” because “somebody’s got to do something” about “antifa and the left.” He refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the (likely) event that he loses. He threatened months and months of chaos if the election does not go his way.

Trump yelled, threatened, interrupted—and changed nothing. All he did was confirm the horror and revulsion of the large American majority that has already begun to cast its ballots against him.

Correction: Trump did one thing. On the Cleveland stage, Trump communicated that he will seize any opportunity to disrupt the vote and resist the outcome. He communicated more forcefully than ever that the only security the country has for a constitutional future is that Biden wins by the largest possible margin...

Even Frum could see by September 2020 that trump was plotting a coup to hold onto power even when he lost the election that November.

Many people will criticize how the moderator, Chris Wallace, managed the debate, and surely he could have done better. But really, nothing short of a shock collar around Trump’s neck would have disciplined the man who is, after all, the president of the United States. A president who does not respect tax laws, does not respect the FBI, is surely not going to be constrained by a debate moderator. It was pandemonium. But it was revealing pandemonium. Who and what Trump is could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates...

It was the worst public behavior out of a President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) in modern memory. There had been times when Presidents like LBJ and Reagan were combative or defensive during public pressers, and in private the likes of Nixon behaved so much worse. Those were mere flashes compared to trump's performance: trump heckled, he interrupted, he spoke out of turn, he YELLED out of turn, he did everything except physically assault Biden. If trump had been graded by the Toastmasters for his debate behavior, they would have flunked him in the first three minutes.

And it wasn't like trump was masterful in his debates against Hillary Clinton back in 2016. He flared out in the first debate, he acted like a bully during the open forum format of the second debate, and he failed to impress during the third debate. 

You have to remember: trump never won the popular vote in 2016 and in 2020. If debate performances are meant to sway undecided voters to your banner, trump only succeeded in rallying his base. His Democratic opponents were able to do that as well, and in Biden's case rallied an uptick in voter turnout that trump couldn't surpass.

This move by the Republicans has all the markings of a sore loser - trump - deciding he wasn't going to play the game on a level field. Either he's hoping that this will force the Debates commission to revise their policies and grant him more power to set the rules his way, or he's hoping he won't have to face the embarrassment of losing debates in 2024. It'll probably be the latter because the commission is supposed to be non-partisan managed between both major parties, and the Democrats on the commission will refuse to yield to trump's antics.

Part of me even wonders why the debates still matter. I understand the optics of it - a public demonstration of the American electoral system, the spectacle of holding elected officials accountable to the issues that matter to the voters - but the mechanics of it have broken apart the past twenty years as partisan hackery took over the democratic (small d) process.

It's not as though our Presidential elections needed these debates over the nation's history. Impractical back in the day before railroads or cars or airplanes that could allow a large gathering to watch a debate of that scale, it would take something like mass communication of radio and television to pull it off. 

Previous elections didn't even have the candidates campaigning all that hard: Late 19th Century tradition made it that they didn't even leave their front porches. Most candidates still stuck to their individual campaigns, avoiding direct public forums as though to avoid giving their opponent any validation.

There aren't any full explanations I can find why candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy agreed to televised Presidential debates in 1960. Kennedy had his reasons because he was trailing the polls as a still-obscure figure, while Nixon was better-known due to serving as Vice-President under Eisenhower. It could have been that television was still a new technology and both sides saw potential in reaching national audiences. We were in the middle of a Cold War versus Communism, so there may have been the appeal of debating with a free exchange of idea(l)s between candidates to market the virtues of elective democratic republics like the United States.

The results were disastrous for Nixon. He debated well enough on the issues, but his image paled in comparison to Kennedy's charisma. Nixon lost his polling lead and then lost a close election. It should be telling that the following elections in 1964, 1968, and 1972 there were no Presidential debates at all (as Nixon ran in '68 and '72, there was no way he was going to fall for that trap again).

It took Nixon's Watergate, and the distrust in elected leaders, for the debates to return in 1976, as President Gerald Ford and Candidate Jimmy Carter both needed them to appeal to an electorate that barely knew both of them. But the rationale - the open discussion of ideas and opposing views on how to answer crises - for hosting these things quickly devolved.

By the 1990s, the focus of the debates were to avoid getting pinned on any ideological position that would get used in attack ads by your opponents, and to basically avoid saying anything dumb to ruin your poll numbers. The Saturday Night Live skit in 1992 aptly titled "Debate ’92: The Challenge to Avoid Saying Something Stupid" pretty much spelled out how bland and boring these debates became.

Nothing's really ever gained in these spectacles, to be honest. The candidates appearing at these debates are prepped into one-sentence ten-words answers that don't say anything, oft-times stuck with those one-liners creating gaffes of their own. Undecided voters tuning in to watch are mostly watching for those gaffes, not for leadership potential or for policies that matter to them. Decided voters don't want to tune in because we already know why we're voting for our candidate. The partisan nature of our nation's political parties have gotten to where the issues don't even matter (look at how the Republicans didn't even create a new platform for the 2020 elections).

We don't need these debates anymore, or at least not right now. Not when the choices are already too stark and the issues are so easily ignored.

It's actually a good thing donald trump doesn't want to do debates anymore. It means less airtime on my television screens to where I and millions of others don't have to look at his orange-painted lying face.