Second GOP prime-time presidential debate was chaos from start to finish

Donald Trump speaks to workers at the non-unionised automotive parts manufacturer Drake Enterprises in Clinton Township, Michigan, on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

The second GOP debate, held beneath Ronald Reagan’s gleaming Air Force One at his grand Presidential Library in California, didn’t live up to the venue.

At the start veteran broadcaster Stuart Varney badly fluffed his co-moderator’s name, Univision anchor Ilia Calderon, and it was downhill from there.

Viewers endured two hours of candidates yelling over each other, bad jokes, pre-rehearsed lines and snarky personal attacks. American radio host Glenn Beck called it “the worst debate he had ever seen in his life”.

There were no winners, only losers: the audience and the three moderators, one of whom – a native Spanish speaker – was difficult to understand to boot.

Donald Trump, fresh from giving a speech to auto workers in Detroit, where he spent the whole evening attacking Joe Biden, would have loved every minute of it, however, as it cemented his position as the all-but anointed GOP nominee.

If anyone ‘won’, it was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley whose feisty attacks on her competitors included telling Vivek Ramaswamy he was too close to China, and not tough enough on Russia. Picture: AFP

If anyone “won” this evening of chaos, it would be former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whose feisty attacks on her competitors left her in a better position to be picked by Trump as his vice-presidential running mate.

“Every time I hear you speak I feel dumber,” she told the confident biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, alleging the 38-year-old was too close to China, and not tough enough on Russia.

She slammed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis too, for opposing fracking, a controversial method of energy extraction that’s become totemic since, early in his first term. For his part, DeSantis, on whom great hopes had rested in the “anyone but Trump” wing of the GOP, tried to turn direct his criticism to Trump.

“He owes it to you to defend his record where they added $US7.8 trillion ($12.2 trillion) to the debt. That set the stage for the inflation that we have now,” he said, launching the first, and few, blows against the former president of the evening.

But he didn’t speak nearly enough, saying nothing for the first 16 minutes, and without the panache he needs to arrest the steady implosion of his campaign.

Ramaswamy, as usual the most articulate and nimble on the stage, prosecuted his “war on woke” with the verbal theatrics we’ve come to expert, but without standing out as he did in the first debate. “Transgenderism, especially in kids, is a mental health disorder!” he exclaimed.

Back of the pack candidate Doug Burgman, the billionaire governor of North Dakota, spoke over the top of the others and out of turn so much that Fox anchor Dano Perino threatened to “cut his mic”.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former vice-president Mike Pence vied for the most cringe-worthy moment of the evening, Christie for a pre-researched line that announced he would henceforth be calling Mr Trump “Donald Duck” for failing to turn up, and Pence for telling the audience he’d been “sleeping with a teacher (his wife Karen), for 38 years”.

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, sent to watch and give the Democrat reply by the White House, rightly concluded that Trump emerged from the debate as “the dominant force”.

“This is the XFL, a vice-presidential debate at best,” he told reporters, referring to a minor league American football league.

Expecting to learn much new from these sorts of “debates” was always a lot to ask: too many people on the stage, too many topics to cover for an audience that isn’t able, understandably, to verify the claims in real time.

The last question asked each to write down who they think should be “voted off the island”. None of them would take the bait. Senator Tim Scott spent valuable time attacking Haley for allegedly spending $US50,000 on curtains while Trump’s UN ambassador, suggesting he might have been a good candidate.