In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.
The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama.
The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans.
But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race: whether anyone can dent former President Donald Trump’s massive lead over the field. At times, it seemed as if the other candidates had lost sight of the fact that it is Trump, not the motormouthed Ramaswamy, who is 40 points or more ahead of all of them in national polls.
“Trump is the big winner,” the Republican consultant Alex Conant told me after the debate. “Nobody made an argument about why they would be a better nominee than Donald Trump. They didn’t even begin to make that argument.”
There were plausible reasons the candidates focused so little on the man they are trying to overtake. The Fox News moderators did not ask specifically about Trump’s legal troubles until an hour into the debate, instead focusing on discussions about the economy, climate change, and abortion. Ramaswamy seemed to be daring the other candidates to smack him down by repeatedly attacking not only their policies but their motivations. “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he insisted at one point. Loud booing from the audience almost anytime someone criticized Trump may also have discouraged anyone from targeting him too often.
But it was more than the debate’s immediate circumstances that explained the field’s decision to minimize direct confrontation with Trump. That choice merely extended the strategy most have followed throughout this campaign, which in turn has replicated the deferential approach most of Trump’s rivals took during the 2016 race.
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Haley took the most direct shot at the former president on policy, criticizing him from the right for increasing the national debt so much during his tenure; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed Trump too—though not by name—for supporting lockdowns early in the pandemic. Yet these exchanges were overshadowed by the refusal of any of the contenders, apart from former Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, to object to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election or his role in sparking the January 6 insurrection. All of them except Hutchinson and Christie raised their hand to indicate they would support Trump as the GOP presidential nominee even if he is convicted of a crime before the election.
To Conant, all of this seemed reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump’s rivals seemed reluctant to attack him in the hope that he would somehow collapse on his own. “Their strategy is wrong,” Conant said. “He’s going to be the nominee unless somebody can capture the support of Republicans who are open to an alternative. And nobody even tried to do that tonight.”
David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican consultant, wasn’t as critical. But he agreed that the field displayed little urgency about its biggest imperative: dislodging from Trump some of the voters now swelling his big lead in the polls. “What this race needs is to start focusing in on [the question of] ‘Trump or the future, which is it?’” Kochel told me. “I’m not sure we saw enough of that” last night.
The failure to more directly address the elephant in the room, or what Bret Baier, a co-moderator, called “the elephant not in the room,” undoubtedly muted the debate’s potential impact on the race. Nonetheless, the evening might provide a tailwind to some of the contenders, and a headwind to others.
The consensus among Republicans I spoke with after the debate was that Haley made a more compelling impression than the other seven candidates onstage. Her best moment came when she lacerated Ramaswamy for calling to end U.S. support to Ukraine, a move she said would essentially surrender the country to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country,” she told Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.”
The debate “lifted Nikki Haley as one of the prime alternatives for the people who are worried that Trump carries too much baggage to get elected,” the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me last night. “She gutted Ramaswamy.”
Ramaswamy forced himself into the center of the conversation for much of the night, making unequivocal conservative declarations such as “The climate agenda is a hoax,” and categorical attacks on the rest of the candidates as corrupt career politicians.
Yet the evening showed why he may not advance any further than other outsider candidates in earlier GOP races, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in 2012. His choice to emulate Trump as an agent of chaos surely thrilled the GOP voters most alienated from the party leadership. But Ramaswamy’s disruptive behavior and tendency toward absolutist positions that he could not effectively defend seemed likely to lower his ultimate ceiling of support. He appeared to simultaneously deepen but narrow his potential audience.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also had a difficult night, though less by commission than omission. In his first turn on such a big stage, he simply failed to make much of an imprint; the evening underscored the limitations of his campaign message beyond his personal story of rising from poverty. “I forgot he was even there,” Kochel said. “Maybe nice guys finish last; I don’t know. He disappeared.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, was as animated as he’s been in a public forum. That was true both when he was making the case for an almost pre-Trumpian policy agenda that reprised priorities associated with Ronald Reagan and when he was defending his actions on January 6.
DeSantis, who seemed slightly overcaffeinated at the outset, didn’t disappear, but he didn’t fill Trump’s shoes as the focal point of the debate either. The other candidates devoted little effort to criticizing or contrasting with him. To Conant, that was a sign they consider him a fading ember: “No reason to risk losing a back-and-forth with a dead man,” Conant said. Others thought that although DeSantis did not stand out, he didn’t make any mistakes and may have succeeded in reminding more conservative voters why they liked him so much before his unsteady first months as a presidential candidate.
Christie in turn may have connected effectively with the relatively thin slice of GOP voters irrevocably hostile to Trump. That may constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the GOP electorate nationally, but it represents much more than that in New Hampshire, where Christie could prove formidable, Ayres told me.
But it won’t matter much which candidate slightly improved, or diminished, their position if they all remain so far behind Trump. Ayres believes materially weakening Trump in the GOP race may be beyond the capacity of any of his rivals; the only force that might bring him back within their reach, Ayres told me, is if his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election commences before the voting advances too far next year and damages his image among more Republican voters.
In a Republican context, Ayres said, “The only institutions that have the ability to bring him back to Earth are not political institutions; they are judicial institutions.”
Kochel, who attended the debate, pointed out that the loud disapproval from the crowd at any mention of Trump’s legal troubles accurately reflected the desire of most GOP voters to bury the issue. “A lot of the base right now collectively has their hands up over their ears and are going ‘La-la-la,’” Kochel said. The problem for the party, though, is that while Republican partisans may not want to deal with the electoral implications of nominating a candidate facing 91 criminal charges, “general-election voters are going to deliver a verdict on all of this even if a jury doesn’t.”
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Apart from Christie and Hutchinson, the candidates on the stage seemed no more eager than the audience to address Trump’s actions. While all of them agreed Pence did the right thing on January 6 by refusing Trump’s demands to reject the election results, none except those two and Pence himself suggested Trump did something wrong in pressuring his vice president. Nor did the others find fault in anything else Trump did to subvert the 2020 result.
The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different.
