Until Donald Trump came along US primary debates rarely made for good television. But even without the brash frontrunner, the Fox News debate tonight (23 August) between the candidates to be the Republican nominee for president will be worth watching for what it reveals about the decay of the party. On a stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, eight straggling candidates will have a chance to sell themselves to the primary voters. The most striking feature of the debate, hosted by Fox presenters Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, will surely be the absence of Trump.
The former president has excused his absence by arguing that he is so far ahead in the polls that there is no point in him attending. Since March, Trump has been expanding his lead over his Republican opponents; the most recent numbers gave him a 37 percentage point lead over his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. The others are trailing far behind, most of them polling in the single digits. Yet Trump’s surging popularity is not the only reason for his refusal to take part. On 18 August one of the candidates, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, told MSNBC that Trump is “very scared of me”. There is an element of truth to that. Although Christie is polling at around 3 per cent, he is the only candidate taking part in the debate who has had the courage to say that Donald Trump is lying about the 2020 election being stolen from him.
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