This was Haley and DeSantis’s time to make a case against the frontrunner. Instead, they clawed at one another fruitlessly for the vast majority of the night.
Others here at National Review have already passed judgment on last night’s final GOP debate between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley before the first primary results in the 2024 Republican nomination roll in with next Monday’s Iowa caucuses. Rich Lowry awarded the night to DeSantis on points; Noah Rothman felt that both candidates came away from the turgid and bitterly argued affair diminished. Both are correct, and yet I think it is Audrey Fahlberg who comes closest in many ways to the core truth of this debate: Donald Trump won, simply because he was not (and did not have to be) there.
If you want to be the Man, you have to beat the Man, and the Man in this case is obviously Donald Trump, who is by all lights cruising toward renomination. So I have no idea what either Haley (who must look ahead to South Carolina even if she pulls an upset in New Hampshire) or DeSantis (who has staked it all on Iowa) were doing criticizing each other rather than the leading candidate in the race. I want to lecture both of them like Alec Baldwin on his “mission of mercy” in Glengarry Glen Ross, except in this case, second prize isn’t a set of steak knives — second prize for either Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley as notorious “betrayers” of Donald Trump is “you’re fired.” There is no road to power after this, whether in a Trump administration or as forgotten relics during the next four years of Democratic misrule.
This was their time to actually make a case against the frontrunner. Instead, they clawed at one another fruitlessly for the vast majority of the night. The specifics of what they said are almost meaningless — DeSantis gave a memorably terrible answer on Social Security as not being an entitlement (it transparently is) that I fear is becoming new Republican orthodoxy during the age of Trumpist populism, and while I can’t recall a lot specifically about Haley’s performance, I was left with the overwhelming impression that a website exists somewhere devoted to monitoring Ron DeSantis’s purported lies about her. Wish I could remember the name.
And thus, nothing was revealed. Ramesh Ponnuru’s takeaway from the debate on Twitter last night was that “no strategic decision in this primary has been more obviously vindicated than Trump’s not to participate in any debates,” and I could not agree more. The obvious reluctance of every other Republican candidate to criticize Trump (Christie excluded — and the man excluded himself from serious consideration years ago) has been brilliantly exploited by Trump’s high-handed avoidance of these sorts of hostile candidate forums. Instead, he acts like a king-in-exile, and they are left with nothing else to do than fight one another. This was the dynamic at the beginning of this cycle of primary debates, and it is the epitaph we are left with. Trump’s 2024 opponents are in a difficult-to-impossible situation, but they have done nothing whatsoever at any step of the way to make it easier on themselves. Everybody is playing to lose.