Maybe the escalating hostilities between Donald Trump and Fox News in advance of Thursday night’s Republican debate are best imagined as a three-cornered tag-team match: Trump and his famous Twitter account v Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and anchor Megyn Kelly v Ted Cruz and the rest of the Republican presidential field. You know, Jeb Bush and those other people.
Who is winning and who is losing? It’s hard to know just where to start analyzing the scramble, but it is perhaps Fox News that comes out worst – unkindly torn between its three ill-fitting personas: responsible news outlet, ratings-hungry cable tabloid and right-wing political kingmaker. Fox took a hit on all three fronts, a trifecta!
Trump, who announced Tuesday that he was bailing from the debate, which Kelly is still moderating despite his demands that she exit, looked truly awful for a while. He still does to some extent – a bully trying to gain the upper hand by use of threats; a coward attempting to evade a hard-charging journalist who had called him on some fact-checked and ugly statements about women.
Then Fox News jumped the shark. The network issued a childish taunt, saying that network officials “had learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president.” The official Fox statement got even sillier, to say that Trump “has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings”. It was over the line, and Trump somehow began to look like the adult in the room. Or, more precisely, the adult not in the room. According to New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, the statement’s central author was Roger Ailes.
Trump has boycotted Fox News before, in September, after Kelly questioned his history of derogatory language toward women in the first debate – a strike that lasted all of five days, until he appeared on The O’Reilly Factor. His new boycott comes just days before the 1 February Iowa Caucus. To their credit, Roger Ailes and Fox News supported their anchor. “Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist and the entire network stands behind her,” Ailes said, even if it means losing Trump in Thursday night’s debate number seven.
Which it did, apparently. Trump waffled for a while, but in the end bailed out. He says he’ll instead hold a fundraiser at the same time, for injured war veterans. Being Trump, he could change his mind again, I suppose, but the startling decision seems to be final.
Trump isn’t looking like the ultimate loser of this affair. Nor is Fox News, where people will undoubtedly turn to see what candidates say in his absence. You can’t hold a serious presidential argument and expect the other candidates not to mention the frontrunner.
The actual losers are the Americans who care about who gets to be the next president. On the eve of a big voting day, they won’t get to see the GOP national frontrunner handle serious challenges, not just from Megyn Kelly, but from the rest of the candidates, several of whom seem to have realized only lately that if they don’t hit Trump hard he will win. How would Trump have handled this? We’ll likely never know. We should.
My solution? There is a long tradition in American politics of debating an empty chair. Clint Eastwood gave it a try, to mixed reviews, at the last Republican convention, talking to an invisible Barack Obama. As Smithsonian magazine noted in covering Eastwood’s 2012 stagecraft, the tradition stretches back to at least 1924, when the Progressive party vice-presidential nominee, Burton K Wheeler, took a stab at an invisible President Calvin Coolidge. That occured in Des Moines, as a matter of fact.
In a manner of speaking, Trump will be in the room whether he gets a chair or not. They might as well give him one.
