Presidential debates

Welcome to Thunderdome. There’s something that happens when you’re around people with feeble minds that make communication a challenge — whether they’re old, disabled or toddlers — where their inability to find the right word or express themselves isn’t a barrier to understanding what they mean. When my one-year-old toddles around the living room and says “baba,” I know she’s asking for her bottle. But there’s an insulation factor here. You understand them even though others don’t. If you are a White House staffer, I have to tell you: you have been suffering from this same disease. You have become insulated and completely resistant to the signals, the ringing flashing klaxons that indicate Joe Biden cannot do the job of the commander-in-chief any more.

Welcome to Thunderdome. I celebrated the official expiration of the Commission on Presidential Debates on my Fox podcast this week, which you can listen to here. It’s a long overdue mercy killing of an institution that has repeatedly failed in its duties and due diligence, with their repeated lies about C-Span’s Steve Scully and his “hacked” Twitter account. Enjoy the ignominious end to this ludicrously overpowered commission. Now the Biden White House and the Trump campaign have agreed on at least two debates, one in June and another in September. There really ought to be August and October debates, too — but those will likely only happen if Team Biden thinks he can convince some voters at a low risk for his candidacy. The big question is: why do this?

After months of speculation — will they, won’t they? — President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump have officially agreed to a set of two presidential debates. In a rather surprising move, Biden released a statement indicating he would not participate in the fall debates sanctioned by the Commission on Presidential Debates (a wholly partisan sham organization, by the way, as my colleague Ben Domenech points out here). Instead, Biden laid out his own set of conditions to his opponent: there will be no audience, no RFK Jr., only CNN, ABC, CBS or Telemundo may host, and microphones must be muted when a candidate’s time expires.

Welcome to Thunderdome. When Joe Biden ran for president, he did the same thing he always does when he does anything: invented an obviously fictional story casting himself as a rescuing hero. In his framing of the situation, he — a lifelong politician who has demonstrated nothing but constant ambition for the White House — was a reluctant candidate pulled from the sidelines by the roaming threat of a dangerous Orange Man and his tiki-torch-carrying supporters in Charlottesville. Biden wasn’t running because he’d been trying to get the job for decades; he had the nobler purpose of healing the soul of the nation.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the podcast has returned just in time for the final days before Iowa’s verdict. All those counties, all those fairs, all that fried food and all that slogging through freezing temperatures and Covid flare-ups has come to this: a caucus that will determine who drops out first, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. You can see in last night’s CNN debate why the hopes were once so high for the Florida governor. DeSantis won the debate, solidly, and has continued to improve as a debater throughout this process. But without Donald Trump on the stage, the back and forth with Haley turned into bickering over lying about records and meta commentary from the former South Carolina governor about bungled campaigns.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where after three long weeks, the Republicans in the House finally found their path toward a speaker — and boy is it a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto of a choice. Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, known for his kinglike dominance of the green line meme, is your new speaker of the House. He is eminently difficult to categorize, a cipher, an ardent social conservative with little in the way of fiscal conservative instincts but with a lot in favor of Zionist support for Israel. If you are a Squad member, this guy’s your nightmare. But he’s also likely to drive the media crazy, because he’s basically an unupdated social conservative from 2004. Perhaps not exactly what the Democrats had in mind when they helped Matt Gaetz knife Kevin McCarthy.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where at long last, the 2024 debate is joined by our would-be champions. And also Asa Hutchinson was there. The night held surprises for several candidates, including going against much of what prognosticators thought would happen. But how much does it mean without the presence of Donald Trump, who ditched the debate, did a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson that produced no news, and had his squad of surrogates rejected at the doors of the spin room? We discussed all of this, winners and losers, and more on the latest podcast — listen and subscribe today!

What, if anything, is at stake in tonight’s Republican primary debate?  The front-runner is skipping the event, instead providing voters with a pre-taped interview he did with Tucker Carlson, before heading to Fulton County, Georgia, tomorrow to turn himself in. As for the eight candidates who will be on the stage — and I don’t want to sound uncharitable here — none has shown any hint of being capable of making a dent in the former president’s commanding poll lead. Underscoring the extent to which this primary is proving to be a rerun of the Trump show, Fox News will reportedly be playing clips of the former president as part of the debate.

Donald Trump has reportedly decided that he won’t be attending the first Republican debate next Wednesday and will counter-program by sitting down for an interview with Tucker Carlson. (The choice is a double middle-finger: one from Trump to the RNC, another from Carlson to his former network.) In the end, the question of whether Trump would show up or not became a fairly low-stakes question. A candidate with a lead as large as his just doesn’t need to sweat decisions like this all that much. Talk of Trump being seen as running scared if he doesn’t show up in Milwaukee next week doesn’t have the same bite to it when he is forty points clear of the field.