Barring some dramatic reversal, none of the people on the Republican primary debate stage on Wednesday night are going to be president in 2025. The eight candidates who made their confused cases to the Republican primary electorate are all flailing in the race, trailing the absent frontrunner, Donald Trump, and fighting among themselves for who gets to lose to him. When Bret Baier, one of the two moderators, told the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, that “Trump is beating you by 30, 40 points” in recent polls, the live studio audience behind him erupted into cheers. On stage, DeSantis kept a rigid smile.
Trump skipped the debate, declining to subject himself to an exercise that would suggest he was not already the party’s anointed leader. He is scheduled to surrender to authorities in Fulton county, Georgia, on Thursday, an event that will generate a mugshot: almost certainly, that image will proliferate across Fox News broadcasts and Facebook news feeds as soon as it is released, eclipsing the debate in the minds of Republican voters.
The other candidates, then, appeared on stage for two hours, delivering pointed and occasionally personal barbs at one another, competing alternately in gestures of masculine sadism and self-regarding piousness, all for the sake of a spectacle that no one will remember by the end of this week, and maybe a third-place finish in Iowa.
Nevertheless, the debate offered a look at the Republican party in miniature: vexed; divided; driven by their base to unpopular extremes, glorying in fantasies of revenge and social purification; increasingly creepy and weird. The star of the night was Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman and political novice who made a fortune with Roivant Sciences, a biotech firm. He has since pivoted to politics and began a second career as an anti-woke crusader.
Ramaswamy is polling behind DeSantis, but has enjoyed a bump in recent weeks as his coverage increases across Murdoch media properties. Like DeSantis, he aims to outflank Trump from the right, taking on the former president’s agenda of “America First” isolationism and social grievance. Unlike DeSantis, Ramaswamy was a confident and commanding speaker, exhibiting a willingness to cut off his fellow candidates, opine on issues he was ignorant on, and issue barbed attacks on other candidates’ incentives, integrity and age that were reminiscent of Trump’s past treatments of the presidential debates as crude exercises in displaying domination.
Ramaswamy was also perhaps the weirdest one there – no small feat. He proudly represents the Republican party’s conspiracist-isolationist turn: he argues against military aid to Ukraine, wants to raise the voting age to 25, claimed on stage that climate change was “a hoax”, and has recently gone to great lengths to clarify what he does and does not believe about the “official” story of September 11.
Ramaswamy is aggressive, charmless, overbearingly pompous and dangerously out of touch with reality – in other words, the kind of guy who has been winning a lot of Republican primaries lately, in the model of Blake Masters, Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano. All of these are figures who have proved irresistible to the Republican party base – and abhorrent to general election voters. Of the eight candidates on stage, Ramaswamy was Trump’s best imitator.
The Cassandra making the case against this kind of politics was Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump administration ambassador to the UN. The only woman running in the Republican field, Haley seems to have assigned herself the role of the voice of reason, imploring her party to come back from the edge and adopt more realistic – and electable – positions. It was her role to explain that American support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion was a part of a broader geopolitical strategy necessary to avert a third world war. It was also her role to explain, with an honesty almost unheard of in Republican politics, that Donald Trump likely cannot win in a general election.
“We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America,” Haley said. “We can’t win a general election that way.” The crowd erupted in boos.
Throughout the night, there were signs of a Republican party trying to move on from Trump – and failing to. The Fox News moderators seemed determined to act as if the debate was taking place in a world where Trump did not exist – save for one question, about whether the candidates believed that Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the results of the 2020 election, there was little mention of the former president, his various scandals or the four indictments against him, except when the candidates themselves brought him up – either to feel out ways for possible attack, or to try to recast his legacy as their own.
Haley noted that Trump’s administration added significantly to the national debt, a line that seemed designed less to appeal to Republican voters – who have little remaining interest in limiting the debt or federal spending – than to court the donors she needs to keep up her frantic and so far fruitless campaign schedule. Ramaswamy called Trump “the greatest president of the 21st century”, which raised the question of why he himself was running. Pence, meanwhile, said he was proud of the accomplishments of what he called the “Trump-Pence administration”, which presumably did not include the incitement of rioters who tried to hang him.
Trump was a constant presence in the debate, his absence and the studious attempts of moderators to avoid him only making his shadow draw longer over the proceedings. But the other sword of Damocles hanging over Republicans’ 2024 electoral prospects was discussed head-on: abortion. The eight people on stage all represent a movement that worked to overturn Roe v Wade, tirelessly and inventively, for decades. But the Dobbs decision was brought up in the debate less like a triumph than like a frightening diagnosis: the moderator Martha MacCallum noted that abortion rights measures have succeeded every time they have been put to the ballot since the decision.
Haley was the moderate on this, as far as the standards of the Republican party go: she generously offered that birth control should remain legal, and that women who have abortions should not be subject to the death penalty. But aside from that bit of magnanimity from the former ambassador, all the candidates seemed determined to double down on the unpopular anti-choice cause.
With the exception of Haley and the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, none would rule out a nationwide ban. Ron DeSantis, a stiff and largely irrelevant presence on the debate stage, refused to answer when asked whether he would institute a national six-week abortion ban as president like the one he signed into law in Florida. Pence, the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and the South Carolina senator Tim Scott all called for a national 15-week ban, and emphasized that states would have the ability to restrict abortion further.
Gender issues were clearly at the top of mind for the candidates, as they so often are for Republicans now. All eight seemed united on the supposedly urgent need to keep trans schoolchildren from playing sports. Ramaswamy took on his role as the party’s id by launching an attack on single mothers, countering that two-parent families were necessary for national health. “The nuclear family is the greatest form of government known to mankind,” he said.
It’s the kind of line that would not be out of place in a radical feminist tract, exposing the ways that law and custom transform women into property, extract their labor, and subject them to sexual and reproductive servitude. But when Ramaswamy said it, he meant it as a good thing.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
