Jake Tapper: “I Reject the Premise” That a Trumpless Debate Is Futile

As a football fan, there is perhaps no worse feeling than surrendering your evening to a pathetic prime-time matchup. This is something millions of Americans experienced on New Year’s Eve, when the NFL pissed away the season’s penultimate Sunday Night Football game on a Green Bay Packers shellacking of the Minnesota Vikings. Maybe the Packers belonged—they are a wild card team. But their feeble opponent preemptively waved the white flag by starting a fifth-round rookie at quarterback, forcing announcers Chris Collinsworth and Mike Tirico to spend the subsequent three and a half hours hyping a dubious product. Over and over, couched in their commentary was a plea: Don’t turn us off just yet. This game isn’t finished.

A few days later, while speaking to Jake Tapper and Dana Bash about moderating CNN’s upcoming Republican debate in Iowa, I couldn’t help but pick up on a similar sentiment. The primary is “actually a lot more fluid than people think,” Tapper assured me, adding that former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis—the debate’s only participants—are both “credible candidates and serious people.”

Donald Trump is once again ducking the stage to run counterprogramming on Fox News. He leads his primary rivals by at least 29 points in most recent polls, including those recorded nationally and in the early states of Iowa and South Carolina. New Hampshire, with its uniquely autonomous electorate, is another story; the former president leads there by an average of about 13 points.

His absences notwithstanding, the seeming inevitability of a Trump renomination is likely to blame for dwindling public interest in debates this cycle. The last one, aired in early December on the fledgling NewsNation network and simulcast on the CW, drew a paltry 4.1 million viewers. The debate before that was hosted by NBC News and brought in 7.5 million viewers, still a conspicuous drop compared to the numbers that tuned in at this point in 2020 and 2016.

By not joining the Wednesday contest, which will begin airing at 9 p.m., Tapper and Bash believe Trump is harming his election chances—and possibly American democracy. But the absences have no doubt helped Trump avoid difficult questions from moderators and attacks from other candidates regarding the 91 felony counts he faces. There is also an image consideration. Had he stood and scrapped in the same arena as Haley and DeSantis and the rest, he would have risked appearing like a fellow mortal rather than his current form: A near-godlike entity, always looming over the debate stage and the entire Republican Party.

Still, to Tapper’s point, even the biggest leads don’t always hold. Rudy Giuliani entered the 2008 election with a sky-high approval rating and name recognition but failed to net a single primary victory. And last season, the lowly Vikings, staring down a 33-0 halftime deficit to the Indianapolis Colts, came back to pull off the largest comeback in NFL history.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: If you’ll allow me to be blunt, I am curious what the point or function is of having a debate without Trump, especially at this later stage, when the novelty and interest in these new candidates have waned, and we know who the nominee most likely is going to be.

Jake Tapper: Is that question premised on polls? Because it is true that polls are not always accurate, and they’re also not necessarily 100% good predictors of what’s going to happen. But if you’re suggesting that we shouldn’t have a debate because some polls are suggesting somebody’s at front-runner status, I guess I just reject the premise. Maybe if we were having this conversation in May I would accept it.

Dana Bash: I was at all of the debates that were RNC-sanctioned, and I actually found them useful. I found it useful to see the way these candidates interact, to see how they answered questions, to see how they do or do not deal with the fact that Trump is not there and that Trump is the front-runner. You can also argue that if not for all of the debates without Trump, Nikki Haley wouldn’t be where she is today. And just to piggyback on what Jake said, I do believe this is a public service—that sounds corny, maybe, but it actually is true. We have enough experience with these that we take it seriously, to have a forum where voters can decide whether or not they like a candidate. Because there are a lot of undecided voters out there.

Tapper: Just to go by the polling you’re referring to, roughly half of the Republican voters in Iowa and more in New Hampshire are looking for a non-Trump candidate. So I think it is a service to let the voters hear from them. Why are they better candidates? I know that there’s this kind of temptation to think that this race is over just because Donald Trump has been so dominant. There are still a lot of courtrooms that Donald Trump has yet to appear in. We don’t know how that’s going to affect what happens. Anyway, that’s an answer to your question, and sorry if I sounded defensive. It’s not aimed at you. It’s just more aimed at the idea that this is done. Hillary Clinton coming in third in Iowa in 2008 was not something that a lot of people predicted.