An hour into Wednesday night’s Republican Presidential debate, which took place without the front-runner, Donald Trump, a simple, altogether predictable question unsettled the proceedings. “If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law,” Fox News’ Bret Baier asked the candidates, “would you still support him as your party’s choice? Please raise your hand if you would.”
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, looked left, then right, seeming unsure; Mike Pence, on whom the complications of Trump’s alleged crimes hang heaviest, hesitated, too. After a moment, both raised their hands, a grudging show of support for their President and rival. In the end, of the eight candidates who qualified for the debate stage, only Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, kept his hand down. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, half raised an index finger, which he flicked in the air while shaking his head, a gesture, he later said, meant to ask the moderators for a chance to explain why he would not support Trump. For a generation, Republican politicians have appeared on Fox News and known what to say to their base. But, in last night’s debate, there was uncertainty on Ukraine, climate change, even abortion. The Presidential candidates no longer seemed so sure that they knew what their voters wanted them to say.
The line going into the evening had been that the assembled Presidential candidates looked a little small and lacking in star wattage without Trump. Could you really imagine any of them winning this thing? Maybe the real action was on Tucker Carlson’s X account, where a pre-recorded video of Trump being very gently interviewed was aired as counterprogramming. But a more interesting possibility emerged—that Trump had opened up fissures in conservatism that neither he nor any of his rivals really knew how to close. An early question about climate change (which the hosts introduced by giving a brief but admirable rundown of this summer’s extreme weather events) gave an indication of how the night would go. Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur turned anti-woke crusader, declared that “the climate-change agenda is a hoax.” Nikki Haley, who was formerly Trump’s U.N. Ambassador and the governor of South Carolina, counterpunched: “Is climate change real? Yes, it is.”
Those two candidates formed the debate’s poles. Ramaswamy—who seemed to personally annoy just about everyone else on the stage (Christie, at one point, dismissed him as “a guy who sounds like ChatGPT”)—gleefully took up the MAGA banner. Haley, who seemed to sense a vacuum, went after Trump for hypocrisy on spending and for being “the most disliked politician in America.” On abortion, DeSantis’s defense of Florida’s six-week abortion ban, and Mike Pence’s unsupported insistence that seventy per cent of the country backed a national pro-life agenda were met by Haley’s get-a-grip realism. “But seventy per cent of the Senate does not,” she said.
It wasn’t as if all of the Republican talking points had disappeared (there was general enthusiasm for a literal war on drug cartels), but, on certain high-profile issues, a genuine debate unfolded. After Ramaswamy made the case for ending U.S. support for Ukraine, Christie gave a characteristically gruesome evocation of the horrors of Russian war crimes. Thousands of Ukrainian children, Christie said, “have been abducted, stolen, ripped from their mothers and fathers, and brought back to Russia to be programmed to fight their own families. They have gouged out people’s eyes, cut off their ears, and shot people in the back of the head—men—and then gone into those homes and raped the daughters and the wives who were left as widows and orphans.” The most unexpected thought entered my head. Was this, against all odds, a good debate? And the truth is, without any of the candidates especially impressing, it sort of was.
All seven men onstage wore dark-blue suits with white shirts and red ties—in costume, at least, Trump was everywhere. In the center of the stage were DeSantis and Ramaswamy, running second and third in the polls, though each far behind Trump. Both are fast talkers, tending toward one and a quarter speed, and terrible smilers: Ramaswamy oversmiles, all teeth and gums, and DeSantis sort of winces. The stakes were perhaps the highest for DeSantis, once considered Trump’s co-front-runner, whose position has been eroding since he announced in May. His speeches, which seemed the most rehearsed of anyone’s onstage, groped for an audience that he could never quite find. The old crowd-pleasers failed him. At one point, DeSantis practically shouted “George Soros,” drawing only a smattering of applause. When he tried to pivot away from a politically tricky question about January 6th by thundering, “We need to end the weaponization of these federal agents,” Baier and his co-moderator, Martha MacCallum, bellowed back, “That’s not the question!” The Florida governor said, a little meekly, “I know.”
Both DeSantis and Ramaswamy are young politicians (forty-four and thirty-eight years old, respectively) who have surged to the front of the field by rhyming their politics with Trump’s. Last night, they were flanked by older, more obviously scarred Republicans, many of whom had twined their fates with Trump earlier in his history and come to regret it. Pence, most scarred of all, got a nice moment when the moderators asked whether he had done the right thing by standing up to Trump on January 6th. “Absolutely, he did the right thing,” Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, said. Christie added, “Mike Pence stood for the Constitution, and he deserves not grudging credit—he deserves our thanks as Americans.” But Pence’s worn applause lines landed as flatly as some of DeSantis’s. When he criticized Democrats for “defunding the police,” there were crickets. Haley’s opening remarks, which attacked the Trump Administration for having swelled the deficit, seemed to capture the pathos of Pence’s position. He, despite having broken with his former boss, was the one forced to defend the Trump Administration’s bad policies, while Trump himself, routing the field, had simply decided not to attend.
Ever since Trump’s ascent, nearly a decade ago, both his supporters and opponents have entertained a fantasy vision of the Republican Party, in which the conflict between the MAGA-verse and Trump’s opponents would be firmly settled, with one side taking over the Party for good. But Trump’s success has been partial—enough to raise doubts about the old consensus, on everything from foreign policy to deficits, without really establishing a new one. And so, beneath the iron grip that Trump has on the polls is the interesting mess of a party on display in last night’s debate, in which everyone vowed himself a staunch conservative but no one seemed to really agree on what conservatism means.
In the run-up to the debate, there had been reminders of the worse fates that Pence, Haley and Christie had ducked: more than a dozen of Trump’s co-conspirators were indicted in Georgia, alongside the former President, for allegedly participating in his scheme to reverse the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election; earlier in the day, Rudy Giuliani was photographed apparently headed into a bail bondsman’s office. Perhaps fortified by those images, the Republican candidates were, as a group, more openly critical of Trump than leaders in their party have been in a very long time. But they also showed that they haven’t yet managed the critical next step: articulating a plausible different direction. ♦
