Because I did something terrible in a past life and have to be punished for it in this one, on Wednesday night I watched the Republican presidential debate. It was the third in a series of televised temper tantrums by a dwindling field of eligible candidates, all pretending that there is a meaningful contest for the Republican presidential nomination and that any of them have the slightest chance of winning it.
In the past, these events have ranged from the chaotic to the deranged, as characters like Tim Scott put a smiling, chipper, aw-shucks sheen on a lurid vision of enforced male supremacy, Ron DeSantis publicly indulges wild fantasies about sending American soldiers to conduct summary executions of Mexican drug cartel leaders on the soil of a sovereign foreign nation, and Chris Christie puts on a poor imitation of someone who believes in his own relevance.
And like the past debates, there was plenty of rancor and personal barbs on Wednesday night, plenty of morbid daydreaming about future regimes of social control, and plenty of fact-free declarations about the supposed causes of America’s plights. There was yelling, and there were insults. Somehow, the whole thing still managed to be incredibly tedious.
Donald Trump, the man who will be the Republican nominee unless he dies before next November, was not on stage. The candidates did their usual dance of trying not to attack Trump or alienate his base – which meant, in effect, that none of them could make much of a case for themselves. Nikki Haley, once a member of Trump’s cabinet, somewhat weakly suggested that Trump was not the right candidate “for now”. Even Chris Christie, whose candidacy is largely seen as a kamikaze mission meant to hurt Trump rather than a serious bid for office, could barely manage to point out that the frontrunner’s legal problems – he faces 91 felony charges – would probably distract him from the duties of office.
For all of the five contenders on stage – Haley, Christie, DeSantis, Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy – their very candidacy suggests a discomfort with Trump: if they really thought he was the best guy for the job, they wouldn’t be running. But a taboo on criticizing Trump remains the one constant that unites the fractious, dysfunctional and internally chaotic Republican party, the one thing that all of them know it would end their political careers to do. They couldn’t go after Trump. So they went after each other.
It would be wrong to say that the candidates’ attacks on one another were exactly ideologically driven. As they gave rambling, euphemism-laden, largely dishonest answers to a series of policy questions, it was hard to discern anything like a coherent policy orientation from any of them – save for Haley, who as in every debate emphasized her foreign policy credentials and seemed interested in reviving some early-century neoconservative positions about the efficacy and usefulness of American foreign intervention.
Others wandered and waffled in their policy prescriptions: when they were asked a question that confused or frustrated them, as happened frequently, both the Florida governor DeSantis and South Carolina senator Tim Scott would pivot to bizarre non-sequiturs about closing the southern border. Ramaswamy pushed an isolationist, “America-first” approach, but nevertheless echoed calls by DeSantis to use the military to discipline southern border immigration. (Ramaswamy, it should be noted, did distinguish himself by also cautioning about crime and immigration at the Canadian border. “Build both walls,” he said.)
Tim Scott, a Christian conservative pitching his candidacy as a return to traditional social hierarchies, “faith-based morals” and compassion, called for a military strike on Iran. They decried protests in support of Palestinian human rights as “pro-Hamas” and vowed to deport foreign students who participated, and to cut off the funding for any college or university that did not sufficiently suppress pro-Palestinian speech. They seemed united in encouraging Israel to take a genocidal, eliminationist approach to Palestinians in Gaza, with DeSantis telling Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job”, Haley instructing him to “Finish them,” and Ramaswamy offering a disturbing fantasy about severed Palestinian heads being displayed on spikes. The candidates also largely agreed, as it happened, that they would cut Medicare and social security benefits. They set about arguing with each other about how much.
The biggest rivalry of the night was between a pair who are emerging as recurring antagonists in these debates: Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. The pair have opposing visions of foreign policy, with Haley calling for greater engagement and intervention abroad and Ramaswamy serving as a conduit for the Republican party’s post-2016 return to nativist isolationism. But they also represent two distinct career paths for Republican politicians. Haley’s rabid, sadistic conservatism is the result of an old-fashioned kind of political vetting – a long career of political ascent, coupled with an affect of credentialed competence. Ramaswamy, by contrast, is a public buffoon, someone with no political experience who has gained his spot on the debate stage with provocative, hateful, algorithmically boosted social media content of outlandish public quackery.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the two had their most pointed clash over TikTok. The pair had been fighting all night: Ramaswamy made a misogynist remark calling Haley “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels”. Haley shot back that her shoes were five-inch heels, and quipped, somewhat nonsensically, that she wore them “for ammunition”. But they fought most bitterly when moderators asked the candidates if they would ban TikTok, the social media app that has become a bete noire on the right. Ramaswamy jumped in to point out that Haley had criticized him for campaigning on TikTok, even though her adult daughter also used the app – he suggested that Haley was not exercising adequate control over her family. Haley told him to leave her daughter out of it, and called him scum.
It was a mistake, and it was also, perhaps, one of the more relatable moments for Nikki Haley, a politician so stuffy and rehearsed that one wonders if she has ever had a thought that does not occur to her in a pollster’s voice. Ramaswamy is scum: he’s self-interested and cynical, indifferent to truth, with a black hole of ambition in the place where other people might have a soul. She was right to be angry. But public expressions of anger rarely serve women.
But what might have been most conspicuous about the debate was what was largely absent from it: for more than an hour and a half, the moderators did not ask about abortion, even though the issue has dominated American electoral politics up and down the ballot for nearly a year and a half. Anger over the overturning of Roe v Wade has become an abiding motivator for voters, with the issue persisting in relevance long after most pundits thought it would fade from national attention, and it is driving unlikely wins for Democratic candidates and their priorities. Abortion had delivered electoral wins for Democrats just on Tuesday, when the issue drove voters to the polls nationwide. Abortion proved to be a decisive issue not only in Ohio, where an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution was ratified by a wide margin, but also played a pivotal role in races in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
When the moderators finally asked about “the way forward” on abortion, in their last question of the night, the candidates mostly hemmed and hawed. Some backtracked or hedged their anti-choice stances; others doubled down. They could not deliver a real answer for the same reasons they could not attack Donald Trump: neither stating their real positions against abortion or admitting that the issue has become a political albatross for the Republican party would be viable paths for their continued careers. They’re not ready to make a real argument on the issue to the American people. Luckily for them, I suppose, none of them will have to.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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