Tonight, a historic event will take place: the least relevant primary debate in the history of Republican politics.
With President Trump leading by double digits in every poll, and in such a commanding position that Fox News has had to reverse its own public denial of credentials to his surrogates in order to avoid complete humiliation, it is clear that this debate will be a farce of epic proportions…or would be, if anyone bothered to watch it. When Doug Burgum, Governor Chris Christie, Governor Ron DeSantis, Ambassador Nikki Haley, Governor Asa Hutchinson, Vice President Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Senator Tim Scott gather onstage, they will all be competing not for the nomination, but instead to outdo Clint Eastwood's infamous address at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Like Eastwood, all these candidates will be shouting at an empty chair; at an absent president who neither knows nor cares about the grievances of a senile politics of the past.
That this is an unserious spectacle put on by mostly unserious people goes without saying. But that does not mean the moment is unserious. President Trump is due to be arrested in Georgia tomorrow, by a DA who began her campaign with a pledge to go after him, on charges only marginally less serious than tonight's debate. Her "indictment" consists less of a legal case than of a laundry list of every tweet that President Trump or one of his surrogates has sent questioning the civic integrity of America's elections, as if the DA's office only combed the enraged quote tweets of #Resistance Twitter.
For this, for doing the same thing that Democrats such as Al Gore and even Hillary Clinton did when faced with election losses, the Democrats want to lock President Trump up for 600 years. Why? Because he is the only candidate running today who threatens the bipartisan police state designed to enrich the most over-credentialed and undeserving elite America has ever known. Like tonight's debate, this should be farcical. But its potential for Banana Republic-style abuse is deadly serious.
Which is why there is one thing that all the candidates at tonight's debate can do that would deserve America's eyes and ears: they can drop out. Imagine that when the lights come up, and Fox's anchors ask this-or-that member of the assembled debaters whatever the initial question is, they instead respond like this:
"I appreciate the question, but I don't think I can answer it, because as of tonight, I am no longer a candidate for President of the United States. The fact is that, so long as the candidate chosen by the American people can be persecuted after his term ends for questioning the bureaucracy, by a bureaucracy that sets itself up as judge, jury, and executioner, We the People are no longer sovereign, and therefore, being President is meaningless. I may not agree with everything President Trump did in office, or how he conducted himself, but for the presidency to mean anything, we must prove that the people are in charge, not the bureaucrats. For that reason, I am suspending my candidacy."
Imagine what a statement that would make. Imagine the face of every enraged, titularly Republican mainstream media flack and elitist donor who had hoped to have the opportunity to vent their bile at President Trump for the next year, only to see the party unite behind him. Imagine, and ask yourself, why isn't this happening?
Once we're united against the common foe, we can spend our precious resources on initiatives like legal ballot harvesting and ballot chasing in key battleground states.
I can't claim credit for this idea. President Trump himself has suggested the same thing, and when it comes to showmanship, no one understands what can make a splash better than President Trump. Nor is this sort of act unprecedented: Mitt Romney, of all people, did the same thing at CPAC in 2008, throwing his support to John McCain. I won't hold my breath; after all, Romney and McCain were both members in good standing of the uniparty, whereas President Trump is the ultimate outsider. Nevertheless, if the candidates at tonight's debate truly want to make history, and perhaps even save the country, there is no better way to do it.
