The real estate mogul detailed his demands to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday, only hours after announcing he intends to individually negotiate his own terms going forward with the debates, and would not sign a letter drafted by fellow GOP candidates outlining a list of their demands.
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Sometimes the moderators ask the candidates whether or not they think another candidate would be a good president. “I’d argue that putting more people onstage actually helps Trump the most, as everyone’s going to want to divide the time evenly”.
It burned worse than Ted Cruz’s machine gun bacon.
He also spoke on the topic of climate change, one of his many initiatives that the Republicans write off as a “conspiracy”.
The Washington Post added this morning that Ben Carson’s campaign – which initiated the intra-party discussions in the first place – has distributed a new letter, despite the unraveling of the revolt.
Reiterating earlier claims, Trump said Walker “did a really smart thing for himself”. Why not a debate hosted by the National Religious Broadcasters, whose members report a weekly cumulative listenership and readership of 60 million Americans? He was cheered after calling for future debates to be moderated by conservatives such as radio host Rush Limbaugh.
“I believe that there’s liberal bias in the media”.
Christie also has ridden the issue to prominence in recent days.
The letter was promptly criticized by the media and mocked by President Barack Obama – he suggested none of the candidates was fit for global diplomacy if they couldn’t handle a domestic news station – making McCain the latest politician to pile on the disapproval. Trump did not appear anxious about Carson’s gains, telling CNN that the retired neurosurgeon “just doesn’t have the experience” or the “temperament” to lead the country economically or on the global stage. But, ultimately, moderators can’t be held hostage to the demands of candidates, to the point where they pull back on asking tough questions for fear of upsetting the candidate and/or creating a public backlash. He highlighted Carson’s leading role in the effort: “With all the people with all the years of government experience, it took the outsider to do it”.
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The ideal solution to improve on the quality and fairness of the primary debates would be to have only Republican-leaning moderators conduct Republican debates and Democrat-leaning moderators conduct Democratic debates. Several more are on tap after that.
