Candidates struggle while-ever Donald Trump remains Republican top dog

Most presidential candidates dare not disavow the former US president while the few who do so lack the support to be contenders.

‘The elephant not in the room’: Donald Trump. Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images via AFP

For the first half of the inaugural two-hour debate of the 2024 presidential election season, the eight Republican candidates not named Donald Trump did their best to avoid talking about the man whose conspicuous absence loomed larger than any physical presence on the stage in a basketball arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

They talked about Barack Obama (bad), Margaret Thatcher (good), Oliver Anthony, a singing farmer whose plaintive indictment of modern America has taken the conservative half of the internet by storm (good). They invoked Jesus Christ – “my personal lord and saviour”, as Mike Pence, Trump’s running-mate-turned personal Judas (according to Trumpland) called him; and the former Covid Overlord and nobody’s personal saviour these days, Dr Anthony Fauci (Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, said he’d have fired him).

From left: Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum arrive on stage for the first Republican presidential primary debate at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night Picture: AFP

But of the former president who leads the Republican primary field by 45 percentage points, there was nary a mention. Until, an hour in, Bret Baier, one of the Fox News moderators, raised what he called “the elephant not in the room”.

Specifically, he asked the seven men and one woman, if Trump were convicted of any of the 96 charges he faces in courts up and down the east coast, which of the candidates would still support him should he win the Republican nomination? Seven hands went up in response, with varying levels of enthusiasm.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the newbie in the race, a highly successful biotech entrepreneur who, at the age of 38, is already well into a second career as a scourge of all things progressive, stuck his hand sharply above his head like the school swot trying to impress teacher, in this case, a largely Trump-friendly live audience.

After a long pause, Pence lifted his hand slowly, almost discreetly, to somewhere just below shoulder-height. Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor, Tim Scott, a black senator from the same state, Doug Burgum, North Dakota governor, and DeSantis sought to pitch their hand-raise somewhere between the eager discipleship of Vivek!, as he likes to style himself, and the visible “don’t make me do this” reluctance of Pence. Only Asa Hutchinson, a former senator and governor of Arkansas, declined to endorse the putative convict-candidate. Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and another ex-friend of the former president, also half-raised his hand but, he later insisted, only to wag his finger in dissent.

The tableau, and discussion that followed, laid out perfectly the entire operating dynamic of this unique presidential contest. It captured the central question of the campaign for this kennel full of underdogs: how do you run against Trump? Knowing that his very outlaw status makes him the darling of so many Republicans and yet knowing too that his behaviour and record, even if not actually criminal, is despicable and alarming to most of the rest of the country, how do you make your case that you should be the party’s nominee?

The reward for Hutchinson’s principled denunciation is a primary opinion poll rating of somewhere between 0 and 1 per cent. And yet, if you’re going to do the full Vivek! and strap yourself loyally to Trump’s mast, what’s the point? Why would voters pick you when they can have the real “victim” himself.

Ron DeSantis seen on the screen at a bar, as a member of the Atlanta Young Republicans attends a watch party of the first Republican presidential primary debate. Picture: AFP

DeSantis, the man widely seen until recently as the most plausible alternative to Trump, has been impaled on this dilemma for months and his poll ratings have sunk accordingly. On Wednesday he tried once again his principal strategy for dealing with the topic: ignore it. He dodged the moderator’s question and launched an attack on Joe Biden’s administration for its “weaponisation” of the justice system. This is not an unfair point – especially with evidence mounting that the same administration has gone very easy on the President’s son – but it’s cutting no ice with Republican voters when Trump makes it with more effect.

Nor are his evidently craven attempts to pander to the populist base of the party. Beyond the Trump apologetics there is no clearer example of this than on the Ukraine war. A solid section of the party of Ronald Reagan – led now by the Putin-admiring Trump – wants nothing to do with foreign entanglements and opposes the US military support for Kyiv. DeSantis joined Vivek! in indicating he would not support more US aid for the war, a piece of cynical posturing that earned him an impressive and stinging rebuke from Haley.

There was never going to be a winner from this debate. But while Ramaswamy cemented his position as the leading acolyte to the former president, and his natural heir should Trump somehow falter, it was Haley who may have advanced her case the most. Her campaign has failed to attract much attention since it launched six months ago. But with her robust defence of a globally engaged America, her warning to her party not to sign up to restrictions on abortion that go much too far for most Americans, and her willingness to tell some home truths about out-of-control deficits, she gave hints of what a conservative with a conscience might offer a post-Trump party.

But there’s the rub. There is no post-Trump party and no prospect of one in the near future.

To underscore the point the man himself skipped the debate for an amiable chat on Twitter/X with Tucker Carlson, the populist provocateur fired by Fox earlier this year. They talked about such compelling issues as television ratings and whether Jeffrey Epstein really killed himself (he did, says Trump). And as you watched it in all its weird, irrelevant banality, it seemed somehow more meaningful for our strange and fractured age than eight Republicans debating in Wisconsin.

The Times