August 24, 2023 12:30 PM UTC

GOP Veep Debate: A Sad Spectacle of MAGA Meh

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• by: Colorado Pols

Last night, a group of would-be Republican presidential candidates held a debate in  Milwaukee, an event most notable for the absence of the far-and-away frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination ex-President Donald Trump. The eight candidates who appeared are all mired in a single-digit pack after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failure to thrive, with at least a few making obvious plays to emerge as Trump’s vice presidential pick.

So as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake surmises, the night’s big winner was…Donald Trump:

It could scarcely have turned out better for the absentee front-runner. He decided to skip the debate because it wasn’t worth his time — what with his nearly 40-point lead in the polls. And the candidates who want to beat him spent much of the debate pretending he wasn’t even in the race…

The risk for Trump in not showing up was that he wouldn’t be able to defend himself. He didn’t have to. [Pols emphasis]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by most accounts had a terrible night of barely concealing his inner twitching monster, made even worse by the fact that DeSantis has fallen so far in the polls that he was not the top target on stage he needed to be to retain his status as the principal Trump alternative. NBC News:

DeSantis still regularly polls in second place behind Trump, but it’s a distant second. These days he’s much closer to mid-tier candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old businessman from Ohio whom most GOP voters knew little to nothing about at the beginning of the year.

And it was Ramaswamy, not DeSantis, who found himself the night’s biggest target, taking the arrows normally reserved for the front-runner — or, in this case, the biggest target onstage, with Trump having decided to skip the debate. The two-hour showdown was punctuated by one-on-one fights between Ramaswamy and former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Vivek Ramaswamy is not a serious candidate for President, and was rightly flayed by his on-stage opponents for his gratingly enthusiastic demeanor and lack of understanding of basic subjects. The two things that Ramaswamy did accomplish, though, were to please former President Trump by sucking up to him at every opportunity, and also effectively sidelining DeSantis by becoming the principal target of his on-stage opponents.

At the same time, dunking on Ramaswamy didn’t do much to elevate former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and we’re not sure that Haley’s bickering with Ramaswamy will matter to Republican primary voters who want to be entertained as much as educated. All of these much more experienced elected officials sparring with an ignorant if quick-witted nobody was a clear lesson in the folly of pig-wrestling: they looked worse for the experience, while Ramaswamy soaked up the screen time.

The most important question of the night was the one that, had it come earlier in the debate, could have saved viewers a lot of time:

Later, they asked whether the candidates would support Trump in the general election if he is convicted. Only Christie and Hutchinson declined, [Pols emphasis] but both DeSantis and Pence were slow to raise their hands. And for some reason, there was no follow-up with them.

When given a wide-open opportunity to take a material stand against Donald Trump, and commit to the modest pledge to no longer support Trump if he is convicted of any of the dozens of felony counts Trump faces in four criminal cases, only Chris Christie and Asa Hutchison, neither of whom have a hope in hell of factoring in the presidential primary, were able to do it. That is an expression of outright contempt for the American criminal justice system that we’re not sure has any parallel in American history. And it’s a moral capitulation by all of those candidates to Trump that calls into question their presence in this race. Why are they running for President at all?

Contrary to a popular misconception among Republicans who don’t support Trump, most Democrats take no pleasure in seeing the Republican Party still in the thrall of a man who cares more about personal power than the democratic institutions Trump attempted to overthrow just a few years ago. A credible conservative alternative to Trump, who could restore trust with voters that the Republican Party is not a clear and present danger to American democracy, would help liberals sleep at night as much as conservatives who still have a conscience.

Last night, Republicans proved again they have no such candidate. It’s not enough to say the GOP is still Trump’s party, despite all the damage he has inflicted on the country to no one’s benefit but himself.

It never wasn’t Trump’s party.