Late Monday afternoon, less than 24 hours after campaigns gathered outside Washington to discuss the reforms, Donald Trump’s campaign announced that the GOP frontrunner would negotiate independently with the media organizations, spurning the other campaigns who had hoped to make a unified effort.
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Representatives from more than a dozen campaigns emerged from a closed-door meeting in suburban Washington Sunday night having agreed to several changes to be outlined in a letter to debate hosts in the coming days.
“This is the first step in the process of understanding what the candidates want, and then we need to have a more specific conversation about NBC”, RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer said Sunday ahead of the meeting.
But there’s at least one Republican the president said he does agree with — Dick Cheney.
The Republican Party cut ties to NBC News after last week’s debate, which drew a record 14 million total viewers to CNBC, in protest of the moderators’ questions.
Mark Levin, a talk-radio host and author suggested by a few Republicans as a possible moderator, told Breitbart News on Monday that the RNC had lost control of the debates. They incorporated concerns from the participating campaigns, warning moderators against belittling the candidates by holding “lightning rounds” or describing “how far away the bathrooms are” after commercial breaks, should candidates leave the stage. “They are not really for the journalists”. They are not really for the candidates. According to The Washington Post, the next debate on 10 November and hosted by Fox Business Network is expected to broadcast as planned. Bennett suggested that campaigns could boycott debates to get their way.
The moderators of the recent CNBC debate received criticism for asking disrespectful and unimportant questions of candidates. To that, Lewandowski, who was in the room during negotiations at a hotel in Alexandria, Va., replied, “If you can put 15 people on the letter, best of luck to you”.
The sheer number of Republican candidates has also created a challenge, said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at University of Southern California.
“As we have for the previous three debates, the Trump campaign will continue to negotiate directly with the host network to establish debate criteria that will determine Mr. Trump’s participation”, a spokesperson for Trump said in a statement.
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On “Fox & Friends”, Chris Christie made his views pretty clear when he said of the debate fracas, “Stop complaining. Let me tell you, if you can’t handle those guys, then I don’t think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too anxious about you”, Obama said.
