34 Things You Missed at the First Republican Debate

My main pre-debate prediction was that Ron DeSantis would go after Vivek Ramaswamy because he had to: If Ramaswamy overtakes him in the polls, it’s over.

Instead, Ramswamy probably commanded more airtime than anybody — and this was despite the transparent efforts by the Fox News hosts to toss him softballs. (Brett Baier’s question about restoring the draft was obviously designed to give DeSantis an excuse to mention his military service.) Ramaswamy has the formula for getting airtime. He just takes wild positions that nobody else onstage does, getting airtime for his positions, then either attacks other Republicans or gets attacked by them, giving him the chance to get more airtime in response.

In retrospect, the flaw in that prediction was my assumption that DeSantis would do something merely because it was the obviously correct choice.

This was like the final few episodes of Succession without Logan Roy. These just aren’t very serious people. If the hope had been that a viable alternative to Trump would emerge here, then this was a failed exercise.

Ron DeSantis was clear in Wednesday’s debate: Invading Mexico is the only prudent option to stop the opioid epidemic.

But he’s hardly alone. This extreme course of action has become a standard talking point in the party, including from the candidate who’s winning the race by 40 points.

During the lightning round, when moderators asked Chris Christie about the “recent spike in UFO encounters,” Christie interrupted before the question was even finished. “I get the UFO question — come on, man!” Christie shook his head in disbelief before saying that “it’s horrible that just because I’m from New Jersey you ask me about unidentified flying objects and Martians. We’re different, but we’re not that different.”

All the attention on Vivek Ramaswamy meant that Ron DeSantis didn’t take many of the attacks that he was expected to be the target of tonight. And, from the point of the view of a Trump ally, that was a good thing. “He was just another person onstage,” they said. “He didn’t shine through.”

Vivek Ramaswamy was expected to take heat during tonight’s debate over his suggestion, this past weekend, that the U.S. should phase out military aid to Israel by 2028. That attack came from Nikki Haley — no surprise — who lambasted what she characterized as his bad “friend” behavior, prompting Ramaswamy to clarify: He’s visited Israel a lot in recent years, and though he dislikes the dependence of its security apparatus on U.S. dollars, he loves Israel’s “border” and “tough-on-crime policies” — shorthand for the government’s brutal treatment of Palestinians, who are subjected to police-state conditions. (A fitting distinction, given the well-documented training pipeline between American and Israeli law enforcement.)

(Haley did finally utter the word about 100 minutes in.)

Mike Pence’s noted disdain for Vivek Ramaswamy was never more evident than in his defense of sending aid to Ukraine — Ramaswamy was the only candidate onstage to endorse cutting off aid, and the two sparred on that topic as they had on multiple previous issues.

But it was hawkish Nikki Haley who got in a memorable line against Ramaswamy on Ukraine:

A crowd that had applauded when Ramaswamy defended Trump has been notably sour on his isolationist foreign-policy ideas.

As the one candidate aggressively opposing any aid to Ukraine, and having made some bizarre and controversial remarks about letting China invade Taiwan after 2028, Ramaswamy drew wrath from several rivals for condoning Putin’s crimes. Then Haley hit him with a comprehensive attack on his positions on Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, concluding with: “You’ve said you had no foreign policy experience AND IT SHOWS!

The premise of the crime-and-guns question assumed that America’s cities are in ruin owing to rampant lawlessness with the moderators citing statistics about the COVID-era crime spike between 2019 and 2022. (Which was, more specifically, a spike in homicides — other categories of crime, like robberies and burglaries, fell.)

But early data from 2023 suggests that this trend is actually reversing, a fact that underpins what’s always been true about the bigger picture: that crime rates are still near historic lows and, despite Pence and Ramaswamy’s claims that cops are being defunded by Democrats and held back by prohibitive conduct rules, the Biden administration encouraged municipalities to spend millions in COVID relief funds on police hiring. (There’s also scant evidence that more and harsher policing causes crime to fall.)

Amazingly, this question also led to what I’m confident is an unprecedented level of focus on local prosecutors for a presidential debate with Pence and DeSantis blaming so-called progressive prosecutors for refusing to prosecute violent offenses. Paired with the looming prospect of Trump’s surrender in Georgia this week after a local prosecutor charged him and several alleged co-conspirators with election crimes, maybe the silver lining to this debate is its emphasis on how central these local prosecutors are to the criminal-justice system. (Usually for the worst, given that the U.S. is the world’s biggest incarcerator.)

One Republican in the debate arena described the audience turning on Ramaswamy very quickly when he started talking about pulling support from Ukraine. “This is insane. Everyone is booing him. It’s over.” They went on to add that “people are openly booing and groaning when Vivek talks. When he got that extra 30 seconds, the whole crowd booed.” In contrast, Nikki Haley apparently received “a standing ovation” when she criticized Ramaswamy.

It’s inescapable by now that all these people are talking over each other for 12 seconds of headlines or some nice tweets when the repetitive nature of their talking points just ensures what’s been obvious from the start: that this will all be forgotten the second Trump’s mug shot is published tomorrow. Who is still watching at this point who’s open to being convinced by one of them?

In his counterprogramming interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump has mostly been allowed to rant on the topics of his choosing: bogus claims of election fraud, “bullshit” indictments, and the sorry state of the GOP field onstage in Milwaukee. There have been some very odd moments — including Trump’s thoughts on President Biden’s trips to the Delaware coast. “I don’t know what they’re doing with the beach,” Trump said. “I think he looks terrible on the beach.” Trump also went off about the Panama Canal and the “vicious” mosquitoes that took the lives of Americans on the project. He also complained about water pressure in hotels, a pet topic.

The fieriest exchanges of the debate so far emanated from a discussion of Trump’s indictments and then Pence’s conduct on January 6. Christie and Asa Hutchinson, predictably, condemned Trump’s lawlessness. Eventually Scott, DeSantis, Haley, and Christie agreed that Pence had done the right thing. No one accepted Ramaswamy’s demand for a promise to pardon Trump. And Haley, who attacked Trump’s spending record earlier, described Trump as totally unelectable. The audience, throughout all these exchanges, was howling in favor of Trump’s defenders and booing Trump’s detractors.

What may be the defining exchange of the first Republican debate came when Chris Christie was booed for criticizing Donald Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election. Christie did not say Trump deserves to be criminally prosecuted. He merely opined that Trump’s behavior was beneath the dignity of the office.

The crowd booed so loudly Christie could not be heard. Christie then said that Trump was wrong to say he would suspend the Constitution, and the crowd booed that too. Christie picked the most moderate possible grounds to object to Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term. That stance was beyond the pale.

Later in the same exchange, the moderators asked Ron DeSantis if Mike Pence was right to refuse to hand the election to Donald Trump, and he replied, “This election is not about January 6, 2021.” Nikki Haley and Doug Burgum briefly said Mike Pence did the right thing by refusing Trump’s pressure to join his coup but immediately said the issue is unimportant and should be ignored.

This is a party whose majority does not believe Joe Biden legitimately won the election and does not believe Trump did anything wrong in trying to reverse it.

The back-and-forth between Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy over supporting Donald Trump in 2024 after a hypothetical conviction in any of the four indictments was celebrated by one senior Ramaswamy staffer. “This is gold,” they said of the exchange where Ramaswamy vigorously defended Trump from Christie’s attacks. It took Christie getting through multiple round of boos from the audience to criticize Ramaswamy over his support for Trump.

Fox is treating the Trump line of questioning like they’re being forced to eat their broccoli. And trivializing it with the hand raise. When Chris Christie started tearing into Trump, in the way that he has done on and off for years (when he wasn’t busy kissing Trump’s ass in a failed attempt to earn a Cabinet post), I thought it would be his star turn — instead, he meekly half-raised his hand in a vow to support Trump if he is the nominee and then gave a forgettable spiel. The truth is all of these candidates are relieved Trump isn’t here to upstage them all, and I think they’re all scared to remind viewers that someone much more popular among the base is watching this at home like the rest of them.

Since 2022’s disappointing showing, Republicans have been struggling to find a way to reconcile their ostensible belief that abortion is murder with the imperative to avoid gifting Biden swing voters in the secular Midwest. One approach to this task is to insist on strict abortion bans in red states, while forswearing federal action, with reference to states-rights pablum. Burgum and Ramaswamy have opted for this path. DeSantis has flirted with it previously but chose to simply not say whether he would or wouldn’t sign a federal ban.

Haley, meanwhile, took the admirably frank tack of noting that the Republican nominee’s position on this issue simply doesn’t matter very much; if conservatives find 60 Senate votes for an abortion ban, then American politics will have shifted so far right as to make a GOP president vetoing the legislation impossible. Haley didn’t say it in quite those terms, but she insisted that Republicans focus on more middle-of-the-road restrictions that could plausibly command congressional support. Still, when faced with a scolding from the arch-pro-life Pence — who suggested that 70 percent of Americans support a federal ban (when, in reality, two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases) — Haley did not have the stomach to say that this was a misleading framing of public opinion, which left her calls for political realism looking rather craven.

There was no consensus on abortion tonight, but there was some weirdness. Ron DeSantis invented a strange story about a woman who allegedly survived “multiple abortion attempts.” Tim Scott lied about states allowing abortion up until the moment of birth. (The latter comment is a relatively common, if completely false, conservative story.) The chaos is kind of the point, though. It’s clear that abortion is a major weakness for any Republican presidential candidate in a general election, and the candidates still don’t really know how to address this. DeSantis appeared the weakest on the issue, reliant on his bizarre story while not really advancing a specific position on an abortion ban. No one would know he’d recently signed a six-week abortion ban as governor of Florida. He can dance around the issue for now, but eventually it’s going to catch up with him, and he doesn’t seem to have a plan for what to do when it does.

After tangling earlier in the debate, Mike Pence and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom few had thought of as adversaries before tonight, were at it again:

This time it was over public disorder. The dispute centered on how to view America’s current crime problem: as a problem to be solved by good government (Pence) or a descent into butchery that requires drastic measures (Ramaswamy).

All the Republican candidates profess to be strongly pro-life, but their disarray on the question of a federal abortion ban was painfully evident. Ron DeSantis refused to answer a question on his support or opposition to a federal ban. Nikki Haley played the pragmatic politician who wants a federal ban but knows it’s not happening. Doug Burgum forthrightly stood for this being a state issue forever. Mike Pence (who worked in a personal-faith statement) and Tim Scott (who referred to the terrible baby-killing ways of liberal states) demanded a federal ban. The whole discussion was confusing and discouraging to people who care about this issue.

Ron DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, but when asked if he would enact the same law nationally if elected president, he conspicuously did not give a straight answer, instead telling a story about a woman who “survived multiple abortion attempts” and calling himself a champion of the “culture of life,” in contrast to Mike Pence, who enthusiastically endorsed it. The issue has proved to be political poison for Republicans since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year.

Nikki Haley is the only woman onstage tonight, and it’s little surprise that she leaned into gender early in the debate. As the candidates sparred over a question on climate change, she jumped in to say, “This is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said if you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.” Haley’s comments follow a previous attempt to anoint herself something like a savior of womanhood by attacking trans people, a common conservative tactic. As the Washington Post reported in June, Haley falsely linked the presence of trans girls in sports to a rise in suicidal thoughts among cisgender girls during a CNN town hall. Such rhetorical flourishes have done little to increase her standing in the polls and didn’t make much of an impression on the stage Wednesday, but as she doesn’t have much else going for her, expect more of the same.

There was a lot of talk going into the debate about the candidates being encouraged to go after Trump for his legal peril and possible crimes. Instead, in the first 30 minutes, the only explicit or implicit criticism of the absent front-runner was from (a) Nikki Haley for spending too much money and (b) from Ron DeSantis for not firing Anthony Fauci.

Moderators asked members of the panel to raise their hands if they believe human activity is contributing to climate change — and nobody did. Instead, Ron DeSantis interrupted to berate the moderators for asking the question and said instead, “We can have the debate” — and proceeded not to answer the question at all.

The Republican Party is the only major right-of-center party in the world that does not acknowledge anthropogenic climate change. The conservative groups that dominate the party’s line on climate change are dominated by climate-science-denying cranks.

Vivek Ramaswamy jumped in after DeSantis to make an even crazier version of the climate-science-denial argument, insisting the entire candidate field other than himself had been bought off by green energy. Chris Christie then attacked Ramaswamy for having used a line similar to one used by Barack Obama (“a skinny guy with a funny name”). Nobody tried to say greenhouse-gas emissions actually do cause global warming.

Chris Christie cut into a Vivek Ramaswamy response about climate change (he declared the climate agenda a “hoax”) to deliver the kind of patented putdown that helped kill Marco Rubio’s candidacy in 2016. Gesturing at Ramaswamy, who had earlier earned Mike Pence’s ire, Christie said, “The last person in one of these debates who stood in the middle of the stage and said ‘What is a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here’ was Barack Obama. I am afraid we are dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight.”

Ramaswamy smiled broadly, as he has all night, and jabbed Christie for once hugging Obama, a cardinal sin in these circles.

Fox has done these candidates a pretty big favor by pretending that Donald Trump doesn’t exist with its first two planned questions. It’s like giving each of them a mic and saying “Okay, please introduce yourself.” But of course the actual focus of the primary, and of all American politics, has yet to come up. That, presumably, can’t last, not least because the main thing most actual Republican-primary voters — especially the ones tuned in enough to be watching a debate without the front-runner late at night more than three full months before voting starts — care about is Trump.

Mike Pence came in hot as the debate began, demanding rebuttal time for a passing remark about the Trump administration, calling Vivek Ramaswamy a “rookie,” and threatening to hold the other candidates accountable for not being willing to cut Social Security and Medicare. He seems to be emulating Trump’s imperious manner, which isn’t a good look for him.

Fox is very obviously putting its thumb on the scale for DeSantis and Ramaswamy with the framing of the questions thrown at them, compared to the questions posed to Christie, Scott, and Haley. DeSantis was not only given a softball opener but gifted with a loose association to Oliver Anthony, who is suddenly the No. 1 artist in the country and the voice of the working man. Ramaswamy was gifted with an invitation to perform a stump speech — which he did very well.

Meanwhile, Christie was hit with a damning stat about the state of New Jersey’s finances when he was governor, Scott was asked to answer for out-of-control federal-government spending, and Haley was humbled with a reminder that her polls are anemic.

Fox is in the influence business. No surprise.

I’ve been covering Ron DeSantis’s lack of social graces for months now, so I was a bit surprised that his first answer was so forceful and so well delivered. But then he concluded with this creepy robotic smile.

In an odd beginning to the debate, Fox moderators asked candidates to respond to themes expressed in the viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which takes aim at a series of favorite Republican targets (welfare cheats, sex-trafficking rings). Ron DeSantis’s extremely prepared answer managed to wend its way to Hunter Biden — though, in a bit of a shock, he did not utter the word “woke.”

Fox News’ coverage of the debate includes a strange addition to debate coverage: a drone. Typically, these aircraft are used for filming events from above, and the money drone-shot leading into the debate shows why they aren’t usually put in service for this kind of thing: It was a bit queasy-making:

When Tucker Carlson opened his Twitter/X interview a few minutes before the debate started, he asked Trump why he decided not to join the debate in Milwaukee. Trump cited his massive lead in the polls and his experience in the 2016 contests:

Do I sit there for an hour or two hours, whatever it’s going to be, and get harassed by people that shouldn’t even be running for president? Should I be doing that? And a network that isn’t particularly friendly to me, frankly. They were backing Ron Desanctimonious like crazy and now they’ve given up on him — it’s a lost cause. It’s reminded me very much of 2016. In 2016 I went through the same stuff. I had to fight them all the way and they became very friendly after I won.

One thing I expect in this debate is for Ron DeSantis to try to destroy Vivek Ramaswamy — and quite possible succeed. He has a strong motive: Ramaswamy is gaining in the polls on DeSantis and using a similar pitch — Trump, but more ruthless and ideologically right wing.

And he has the opportunity. Ramaswamy has devastating vulnerabilities. He once held a Soros fellowship, and George Soros is obviously one of the figures most despised by the right. Ramaswamy is also Hindu, and making that known to the Republican base, sadly, could cause much of his support to melt away. DeSantis might or might not bring up the religious-identity issue (if he does, he’ll probably try to slip it in subtly and get the press to cover it for him), but he will likely bring up Soros.

DeSantis knows that if he falls behind Ramaswamy in all the polls, the bottom may drop out. He must, and probably can, stop the bleeding by destroying the closest competitor.

Donald Trump might not be there, but his team will be watching Ron DeSantis — his once-close rival — closely. One Trump ally’s take:

The main take is that Ron doing good isn’t enough. He needs to make sure there is consolidation and he is a rockstar. So if Vivek or Haley or Scott has a good night, that’s enough to make it a wash for Ron.

A preliminary thought for tonight’s debate. The latest Morning Consult poll puts Trump’s favorability ratio among potential Republican-primary voters at 76-23. So Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson are aiming at the 23, and everyone else doesn’t want to offend the 76. But Christie and Hutchinson really need attention, so they will probably go pretty big on attacking Trump in order to draw attacks to their own selves. Kinda perverse.

For a full look at what the candidates need to do — and not do — check out my strategy primer here.

Intelligencer’s Eric Levitz has detailed three major questions going into the debate, including: Can Ron DeSantis retain his title as Trump’s stiffest competition?

Recently, the former co-chair of the Ready for Ron PAC, Ed Rollins, expressed regret at encouraging his candidacy, telling Rolling Stone, “I don’t think it’s the campaign’s fault at all … I think he’s been a very flawed candidate,” adding, “every time he opens his mouth, he has a tendency to — shall we say — think out loud, and he clearly doesn’t understand the game.”

Now, entrepreneur and political neophyte Vivek Ramaswamy is breathing down DeSantis’s neck in national polls.

All this means that DeSantis is liable to be a punching bag on Wednesday night. Typically, a primary campaign’s front-runner bears the brunt of debate attacks, as every other candidate onstage has an incentive to damage them. With the actual Republican front-runner absent and DeSantis looking vulnerable, all guns will be trained on the Florida governor. Further, whereas the GOP electorate’s deep affection for Trump limits his rivals’ appetite for ripping the ex-president, the typical Republican voter has no strong emotional attachment to DeSantis.

Read the rest of Eric’s preview here.