Republican pile on in Milwaukee produces no clear winner

Donald Trump, who didn’t show up for the GOP debate, remains in poll position to win the nomination.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley clash in the first debate of the GOP primary season hosted by FOX News in Milwaukee on Wednesday night. Picture: AFP

Being likened to ChatGPT, the omniscient AI application that can answer any question in a flash, might not be such a bad thing after all.

Political brawler Chris Christie, the larger-than-life former governor of New Jersey, slammed Republican newbie Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur who has surged from political nowhere to third place in the Republican race for president, for “sounding like ChatGPT”.

“The last person in one of these debates who stood in the middle of the stage and said ‘what’s a skinny guy with odd last name doing up here’ was Barack Obama,” Christie added, in what was meant to be a criticism of Ramaswamy, but served to remind the audience that longshot candidates like Ramaswamy can sometimes win.

If there was a signature exchange of the first GOP debate for the 2024 nomination, which saw eight hopefuls grace the stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it was this.

Indeed, much of the two-hour debate, which the overwhelming frontrunner Donald Trump bothered not to attend, saw an older, more experienced set of politicians, including former vice president Mike Pence, attack the political upstart, who throughout was characteristically fluent, knowledgeable — and very “pro Trump”.

Pence called him a “rookie”, declaring “now is not the time for on-the-job training”. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley accused him of “choosing a murderer over a pro-American country”, referring to his lack of support for further US military support for Ukraine.

The attacks reflected not only Ramaswamy’s rapid political ascent, or even his youth, but increasingly a gaping fissure within the Republican Party. Ramaswamy — as with Trump, who he admires — represents the more isolationist wing of the GOP, which also deeply loathes the so-called deep-state agencies.

Ramaswamy and the other six may as well have been from different political parties. The political divide in the US is no longer workers v capitalists, but insiders v outsiders, or elites and everyone else — a division that bisects both major parties.

Ron DeSantis, the current Florida governor and still the highest-polling candidate behind Trump, tried to straddle the divide, tepidly supporting Trump and Ukraine, but the risk is he ends up appealing not enough to either wing of a divided GOP.

Indeed, when a viewer question demanded candidates raise their hands if they believed in human-induced climate change, DeSantis quickly cut the exercise off, perhaps unwilling to reveal his hand to the audience. “We‘re not schoolchildren, let’s have the debate,” he said.

Ramaswamy, typically emphatic, called the “climate change agenda” a “hoax”.

DeSantis reminded viewers of his record during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he baulked at extended lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but he didn’t speak long enough for the putative polling frontrunner on the debate stage, coming in fourth behind Pence, Ramaswamy and Christie in total number of minutes.

It wasn’t the game-changing performance he needed. “With no clear winner, the winner was Trump. Nothing happened to change the dynamic of this race tonight,” noted former Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

Trump wouldn’t have been too concerned about losing his lead, which has increased further among Republican voters after his multiple indictments for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election, to around 40 percentage points in some polls.

His prerecorded interview with Tucker Carlson drew more than 80 million views on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, at least a magnitude more than the million or so who could afford to tune into US cable television.

“Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We cannot win a general election that way,” Haley said during the debate.

She may be right, but the considerable bulk of Republicans still support the legally embattled former president. The fact every male candidate was wearing a red tie on the night, something Trump has made almost his trademark, was telling.