Why is no one talking about REAL reason Donald Trump is skipping the first Republican debate?
Unless Donald Trump changes his mind at the last minute or this has all been some kind of weird misdirect, he’s going to skip the first Republican 2024 presidential primary debate, and instead do a sit-down with disgraced right winger Tucker Carlson on that same night. Everyone is talking about whether this is a good strategic move on Trump’s part or if he’s making a mistake. But everyone is overlooking the real reason why Trump isn’t doing the debate: he can’t.
Whenever Trump has occasionally appeared in public over the past year or two, he’s come off as somewhere between half senile and mostly senile. I’m not saying this about him to be mean, or because I don’t like him. I’m saying it because it’s true. Trump in 2023 is so far gone cognitively, he makes the Trump of 2016 or even the Trump of 2020 sound sharp as a tack in comparison. If you’ve watched a loved one go through dementia, you know it when you see it, and you know how far gone Trump is. He’s in bad enough cognitive shape that if you didn’t hate him you’d feel sorry for him.
When Trump tries to give pre-written speeches these days, they go fairly poorly, as he wanders off the script with inane stories. When Trump occasionally does interviews with a friendly host, he comes off even more poorly, but at least the host tries to keep him on track. There’s a reason Trump very rarely does interviews with non-friendly hosts. We saw that when he made the huge mistake of doing his CNN town hall. Even though Kaitlan Collins didn’t hit him hard at all (and the audience was limited to his supporters), he still performed extremely poorly because Collins didn’t try to coddle him.
Now imagine this same largely senile Donald Trump trying to appear on a debate stage with a bunch of opponents, all whom will be trying to explain why they’re better candidates than he is, some of whom (such as Chris Christie) will try to hit him hard, and with no one to hold Trump’s hand and keep him on track. Trump would instantly fall to pieces in a confused haze, on live national television. It would be the end of him.
Trump’s base might not care if he melts down in a senile haze during a primary debate, but everyone else would. The numbers make clear that the Republican primary voting base is much larger and broader than Trump’s own personal base – and polling says that half of that Republican primary voting base has already decided that it wasn’t someone other than Trump to be their nominee.
Republican primary voters are already being asked to swallow the laugh out loud idea of a nominee who is about to stand criminal trial four times on 91 felony counts and will likely be a prisoner by the general election. If he gets on a primary debate stage and comes off as senile as Grandpa Simpson, it’ll be over him.
And so Trump can’t do a Republican primary debate. Whatever it costs him by not doing it – and there will be a cost, because some primary voters on the fence will take it as a sign that he’s not serious about running – there would be an even greater cost if he gets on the stage and lets everyone see just how cognitively inept he is these days.
Trump does understand – or at least his handlers do – that there’s a cost to hiding a candidate like this. That’s why his handlers have him doing an interview with Tucker Carlson that night. It’ll at least allow Trump’s apologists to argue that he’s doing the interview instead of the debate because he’s too important to be on stage with all those losers. Carlson, whose career is over, is a good strategic choice. These days he’s so desperate for any fleeting moment of relevance, he’ll bend over backward to try to help keep a confused and blathering Trump on track during their interview.
Of course this is all a temporary fix. What is Donald Trump going to do, skip out on every Republican primary debate? How’s he going to explain that? Each time he doesn’t show up, it’ll just hand the spotlight to all the other candidates. They’ll point out that Trump’s unavailability for the debates is a harbinger for how he’ll be unavailable throughout the primary season due to his criminal trials, and unavailable in the general election due to his convictions and prison sentences.
But nothing about Donald Trump’s 2024 “campaign” is built to last anyway. None of this is about the long term. The guy’s going on criminal trial four times, and will have four prison sentences hanging around his neck, between now and the next election. He is, laughably obviously, not going to be a viable candidate one way or the other by the time we get to election day.
This is a guy whose life is already over. Short term is all that Trump has. His essentially imaginary 2024 “campaign” is something he’s just trying to keep going one day at a time, so he can keep spending one more day grifting. It’s made that much more complicated by the fact that he’s now closer to senile than coherent. His babysitters know that if they put him on a debate stage, the entire grift falls apart on the spot. And so they’ll keep him off the debate stage for as long as possible, even if it means chipping away at his long term viability, because this is not a guy with any long term viability anyway.
Meanwhile, no one in the media and pundit class – left, right, or center – seems to want to admit that Donald Trump is trending senile. They don’t want to give up the game yet either. They want to get ratings out of this imaginary “Trump 2024” narrative for as long as they can. They’re already pretending he’s not going to go on trial before the election. They’re that desperate to make us believe that Trump is still somehow magically viable for 2024, so we’ll remain scared enough to stay tuned in each day. The media can’t sell that narrative if they admit to us that they know Trump’s brain is a bag of cats. But all you have to do is listen to Trump speak these days to see that he’s now a mentally vacant parody of his former self. And that’s the real reason he can’t show up to the debate even he wanted to.
