Not Debating is the Smart, Boss Move by Trump

This will be brief, but it’s worth noting…

Donald Trump has been taking some heat in the media and from Republicans supporting Ron DeSantis and other candidates over his decision to skip the first GOP debate next week. Vivek Ramaswamy even called Trump - of whom he has rarely been critical - a “coward” for deciding to do an interview with Tucker Carlson on his incredibly popular Twitter show rather than standing on a stage with 8-10 also-rans whose campaigns are all miserable failures.

Trump himself made the key point in all of this: He has the biggest lead in a supposedly contested nomination process of any candidate in modern times, by far. The lead is overwhelming at this point, as none of the campaigns mounted by DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, Tim Scott or any of the other non-entities are catching on with voters.

While I personally have favored DeSantis and still do, the simple fact is his campaign is a joke at this point, as the candidate himself hired the wrong advisors and keeps committing stupid errors. He once polled almost equally to Trump in the race, but that was long before he finally decided to get into it, and he consistently trails Trump by 40% or more in every national poll on the race taken lately.

Ramaswamy just did his own interview with Carlson, and it was fantastic. The guy is brilliant, but what does that mean? That he will move up from about 10% support to 12% in the next round of polls?

None of the rest of this field is polling enough to even mention here. They’re all just mired in the single digits, or, like Asa Hutchinson, often not showing up in the results at all in some of the polls.

Given his massive lead and the clear sentiment among a majority of GOP voters to hand him the party’s 2024 nomination, for better or worse, why, then, should Trump participate in a debate in which he would obviously have nothing to gain, but plenty to lose? Trump’s already overwhelming lead in the race means that the only potential momentum change coming from his participation in a debate with the field would be a change favoring one of the other candidates.

So, Trump’s call is clearly the right call - it is the boss move here - and all the criticism coming from the other camps amounts to nothing more than sour grapes.

That is all.