|
Listen now
|
Former President Donald Trump, the early front-runner for the nomination, skipped the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, instead opting to appear in a pre-recorded interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson Wednesday night on X, the Platform formerly known as Twitter.
The interview was posted online five minutes before the debate aired.
“Do I sit there for an hour or two hours, whatever it’s going to be, and get harassed by people that shouldn’t even be running for president?” Trump said in the 46-minute interview. “Should I be doing that at a network that isn’t particularly friendly to me?”
Trump attacked some of his rivals early, calling former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson “nasty,” and cited him as an example of someone who shouldn’t be on the debate stage, along with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Both Christie and Hutchinson have been critical of Trump and said he shouldn’t be running for president.
“I’m going to have all these people screaming at me, shouting questions at me, all of which I love answering, I love doing. But it doesn’t make sense to do them so I’m taking a pass,” Trump said.
Carlson tried to engage Trump about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and then asked Trump if his political opponents might threaten his life, which Trump didn’t dismiss.
“They are savage animals. They are people that are sick. Really sick. You have great people in the Democrat Party, great people that are Democrats,” Trump said. “But I’ve seen what they do, I’ve seen the lengths that they go to.”
Before Trump on Sunday announced his decision to skip the debate, several Fox News personalities and executives had encouraged him to participate. While many hosts on the network boosted Trump over the years, the former president has been complaining since he left office about what he feels is unfair coverage.
His decision to instead sit with Carlson also seems designed to send a message to the network, which fired the host earlier this year. The network offered no explanation, but it occurred shortly after Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit for the network’s coverage of bogus claims by Trump after the 2020 election.
Trump and his team have not clarified if he will skip every Republican debate, or at least those announced thus far. He has complained about the location for the second debate in September, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, because Fred Ryan, the publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, is the chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is in Milwaukee as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, called it “pointless” for Trump to debate because he is so far ahead in the polls.
“There’s nothing that he has to prove on that stage with them,” she said in a Wednesday interview. “They have everything to prove against him.”
Many of the candidates on the debate stage have embraced Trump’s policies, including his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has criticized Trump for not going far enough to follow through on his policies.
Three other candidates all worked for Trump: Mike Pence, his vice president; Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s U.N. ambassador; and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who helped Trump prepare for debates in 2016 and 2020 and led his 2016 transition team.