The editors of the Wall Street Journal editorial page took Donald Trump to task late Sunday for ducking the Republican Party presidential debate this coming week and assuming that GOP voters will fall in line behind him.
Conservative voters deserve better than that and the former president should be willing to stand on the stage with his competition and demonstrate why he should be given a third shot after suffering a rare loss by an incumbent in 2020, they wrote.
As the editors noted, the former president has instead decided he would rather sit down with former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson – who also recently lost his job – writing that the former "Fox News host will be on hand less as an interviewer than to endorse the former President’s claims that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is America’s fault and that the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was merely a case of exuberant supporters getting slightly carried away."
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The editors suggested Trump should face the music just like the others vying for the 2024 presidential nomination.
"Mr. Trump clearly thinks he has the nomination all but wrapped up, and judging by the current polls he has reason to think so. But what a message he is sending about the loyalty he thinks GOP voters owe him, " they accused.
"It would mean the Grand Old Party is going to nominate, for the third time, a man who has been indicted four times on 91 felony counts. We don’t mean despite being indicted. We mean because he’s been indicted."
According to the Journal, by giving Trump a pass on the debate, Republican voters are playing into the Democratic Party's hands.
"In order to spite the Democrats for their partisan prosecutions, GOP voters would be doing exactly what Democrats and the press corps want them to do. Democrats want Republicans to nominate the man who has shown over the last three national elections that he is the greatest voter turnout machine for the Democratic Party since Franklin Delano Roosevelt," they predicted.
Having explained that, they challenged Republicans to consider the former president's motivations for running again, writing, "Republican voters often say they like that Mr. Trump is a fighter, but for whom is he fighting? Them, or himself? He would carry into the general election more baggage than the British royals. Yet Mr. Trump expects GOP voters to nominate him without so much as a primary debate, much less a real nominating contest."
"There are still five months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, and perhaps Mr. Trump’s presumption is mistaken. But political parties have made repeated nominations in the past in thrall to one man and suffered repeated losses for it. Democrats did it three times with William Jennings Bryan in 1896, 1900 and 1908, and Republicans are tempting the same fate," they concluded.
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