The New Yorker-Thank You for Speaking While Im Interrupting The Crosstalk Chaos of the Second Republican Debate

It took about a half hour for the Republican Presidential debate on Wednesday night to descend from merely being very boring to unrecoverable chaos. Tim Scott, the U.S. senator from South Carolina, asked Vivek Ramaswamy, the founder of a biotech company, how he could accuse his rivals of being “bought and paid for” when he himself was “just in business with the Chinese Communist Party and the same people who funded Hunter Biden.”

Ramaswamy, whom none of the other Republican candidates for President can really seem to stand, either politically or in the most basic human way, spread his arms dramatically to indicate the others onstage. “These are good people, who are tainted by a broken system . . .”

“Not all of us are tainted!” the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who is polling around one per cent, called out, and then Scott, Ramaswamy, and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, started speaking all at once. It took close to two minutes for their voices to become fully disentangled. When Ramaswamy tried claiming credit for disinvesting from China, Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador, jumped in: “Yeah, right before you ran for President,” perhaps the lone good line of the crosstalk apocalypse.

Ramaswamy did not look flustered—his smile was broad, his hair was piled into a pompadour, his voice was declarative—but he also plainly had no idea what he was trying to say. At one point he tried to break through the noise, saying sardonically to his rivals, “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”

This was the “thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting” debate, the event at which the confusion and aimlessness of the Republicans challenging Trump for the Presidential nomination became apparent to all. Trump, far ahead in every poll, had opted out of the event, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley, California, a venue whose leadership he has sometimes sparred with. In his absence, the debate was billed as a chance for the other Republicans on the ballot to change their fortunes: for Haley to establish herself as the mainstream alternative to Donald Trump, for Scott to make clear what he is campaigning for, and for DeSantis to find a way to reverse his slide in the polls, which has now lasted several months and still defines the campaign.

On that count, DeSantis failed from the beginning, when it took a full fifteen minutes for the moderators to call on him. When he did get a chance to speak, generally looking a little glum, he tended to rattle off some suspiciously rehearsed-sounding lines. Of his plans to expand domestic oil drilling, DeSantis said, “We’re going to choose Midland over Moscow. We’re going to choose the Marcellus over the Mullahs. We’re going to choose the Bakken over Beijing.” Stop this man before he alliterates again.

But, really, it wasn’t much better for his rivals. For months, the press had speculated about how severely Chris Christie would damage Donald Trump if the former New Jersey governor could only make it onto the debate stage. Having made it, Christie now had his opportunity to speak directly to Trump: “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on the stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things. And let me tell you what’s going to happen. You keep doing that, no one up here is going to call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re going to call you Donald Duck.” At this, Christie looked unaccountably pleased with himself.

That was the level. At one point Ramaswamy responded to a question about parents’ rights by saying transgenderism was a mental illness. “I’ve been sleeping with a teacher for thirty-eight years,” Mike Pence said, referring to his wife, Karen, who used to teach art at a private Christian school in Virginia. “Full disclosure.” Forced to pick a winner, I might go for Nikki Haley, largely because she looked appropriately disgusted with everything going on around her. On the eve of the debate, CBS News had released a poll that seemed to suggest that the race wasn’t yet over: most Republican primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire were still considering more than one option, the poll found, and the “only-Trump voters are outnumbered by the third of the electorate who aren’t considering him at all.” If that provided a glimmer of hope at the outset of the evening, it faded very quickly once the debate began. None of these candidates look like they can beat Donald Trump.

Why is the Republican field so bad? One explanation might be that amid the cyclic loyalty wars that have largely consumed the G.O.P. for the eight years since Trump began his first run for the Presidency, the supply of new ideas has dwindled. The broadcast, hosted by Fox Business and Univision, had begun with a handsome photo tribute to Ronald Reagan: throwing a football, mounting a horse, telling a debate audience that the nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But even beyond that, there was something stale in the endless repetition of lines about the crisis at the border, the national debt, the importance of family values. It wasn’t exactly that Trump had destroyed the Party’s establishment wing so much as he had preserved it in amber—as if, at the moment that he descended the escalator in Trump Tower, Republican time had stopped.

Midway through the debate, the moderator Dana Perino asked a good question (not her only one) of former Vice-President Pence. “You said last month that if elected you would repeal all Obamacare mandates,” Perino said. “However, you made that same promise in 2016.” Why, Perino asked, was this time any different?

Pence, whose defiance of Trump on January 6th had earned him a reputation as a man of honor in the field, said, “Well, first let me speak to the mass-shootings issue.” And so rather than explain why Obamacare was still the law of the land if he’d had the power to repeal it, Pence explained that the solution to mass shootings was to expedite the death penalty, so that anyone found guilty of a mass shooting would face execution in “months, not years.”

Perino waited this barbarity out. Then she said shrewdly, “Does this mean Obamacare is here to stay?” The crowd laughed and clapped, because she was right. It probably is. ♦