With a fierce and noisy debate, eight candidates for the Republican presidential nomination of 2024 entered their first direct confrontation on Wednesday night. In the absence of the favorite, former President Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, among others, had the chance to present themselves to a national audience.
Trump, who has been leading in polls of Republican voters for months, did not participate in the debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Instead, he appeared in an interview on X, formerly Twitter, with Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host. That was published at the same time to overshadow the debate at that channel. Trump did not feel compelled to be “harassed by people who shouldn’t even be running for president,” he said.
Read also: Trump appears in interview on X with Tucker Carlson
The former president, who has been indicted four times in the past six months for crimes he allegedly committed before, during and after his presidency, would like to report to the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta this Thursday afternoon. He was charged there last week with alleged attempts to undo his 2020 election defeat in the state of Georgia.
While the shadow of Trump and his legal troubles hung over the debate, his absence also allowed for a fervent discussion on topics from abortion and the economy to migration and the war in Ukraine, which painted a picture of a post-Trump Republican party. In addition to DeSantis and Ramaswamy, former Vice President Mike Pence, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota along. Four highlights:
1 Ramaswamy steals the show
Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old bio-tech entrepreneur, in particular, jumped into the hole left by Trump, with an animated performance that drew huge cheers and applause from the audience. The young, eloquent candidate, who has no political experience, stole the show with a deluge of sharply worded, hard-hitting positions such as “the climate change agenda is fake” and “an open border is no border.” The lone millennial in the Republican race thus presented itself as an unashamedly conservative candidate, in the style of Trump.
Ramaswamy, a son of Indian immigrants who has been rising in polls among Republican voters in recent weeks, has shown himself as willing as Trump to seek confrontation. “Do you want a patriot who tells the truth?” he asked his audience. “Do you want incremental reforms, or do you want a revolution?”
But while Ramaswamy’s powerful one-liners scored in the audience, they also drew strong resistance from other candidates. Christie accused him of “sounding like ChatGPT” and called him an amateur. Pence also pointed to his lack of experience. “Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” said the former vice president. “We shouldn’t bring in a rookie.”
2 Support for Trump
Even in his absence, Trump delivered one of the undisputed highlights of the debate. Asked if they would support Trump as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate if he was convicted of a crime, six of the eight candidates raised their hands — Ramaswamy first, Pence and DeSantis a little later.
“President Trump was the best president of the twenty-first century,” Ramaswamy said vehemently. “We must end the use of justice as a political weapon,” he continued, referring to the assumption of many Republicans that Trump is being prosecuted for political reasons at the instigation of his Democratic opponents, in order to prevent his re-election.
Only Christie and Hutchinson said they would not support Trump if convicted. “Someone has to stop the normalization of misconduct,” said Christie, who has emerged as the most outspoken anti-Trump candidate in the race, to loud boos in the room. “Whether you believe the criminal charges are good or bad, the conduct is beneath the office of the President of the United States.” Both candidates have very little support in the polls.
Haley, who is also low in the polls, tried to distance herself from her former boss in other ways. She said the question of whether he could run for president again after a conviction is up to voters, but she lashed out at Trump’s fiscal policy. “Donald Trump has added $8 trillion to our debt,” she said, referring, among other things, to his stimulus policies during the corona pandemic. She presented herself as a true fiscal conservative.
3 DeSantis outflanked
For DeSantis — who leads the rest of the field by several percentage points behind Trump in polls — the debate was an opportunity to restart his campaign after a series of missteps. While he made a strong case that his conservative Florida policies showed he would be the politically most likely heir to Trump, he was eclipsed on stage by the more energetic Ramaswamy.
DeSantis underlined that as governor of Florida he has gone against lockdown policies, which he holds responsible for the country’s problems. “As president, I will ensure that bureaucrats of the deep state could never force you into a lockdown,” he said. He was trying to score at the expense of Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who acted as key White House adviser during the pandemic and a favorite target of Republicans. “You invite Fauci in and you say to him, Anthony, you are fired,” said DeSantis, a slogan used by Trump as host of the program The Apprentice.
4 division in Ukraine
The candidates were sharply divided over US support for Ukraine. Ramaswamy took an isolationist position. He called it “disastrous” that the US is contributing tens of billions of dollars to fighting “the invasion across someone else’s border, when we should be using those same military assets to prevent the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States.” , referring to the arrival of migrants through the border with Mexico.
Pence and Christie argued that if Putin is not fought, he will attack a NATO country. After Ramaswamy stated that not Russia, but China is the main threat, former UN ambassador Haley snapped at him: “You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.”