SALT LAKE CITY — As criminal and congressional investigators close in on former President Donald Trump, the party he leads continues to bend to his will with a new rule designed to punish the debate organization in which Trump performed poorly in both of his campaigns and a resolution condemning two of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics.
At its winter meeting at a plush hotel in the shadow of the snow-capped Wasatch Range, the Republican National Committee is moving forward with a rule that its 2024 presidential nominee must refuse to participate in the autumn debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan group that has organized them for more than three decades.
“It’s a good idea. It’s been a problem for a long time,” said Ohio committee member Jim Dicke.
The move comes after a failed effort by the RNC to force the commission to change its format in a number of ways to be more “fair” to Republicans. It was led by David Bossie, a Trump campaign adviser in both 2016 and 2020 and now an RNC committee member from Maryland.
Bossie, who declined to comment, is also behind a resolution demanding that House GOP leaders expel Reps. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, and Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois, from the Republican caucus for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. Both are serving on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, which Trump incited for weeks with lies that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him through massive fraud.
“We’re requesting that they do their jobs and kick them out,” Louisiana committee member Roger Villere, a resolution co-sponsor, said.
A number of RNC members said the resolution is likely to be watered down, but that some form of it probably has the support to pass the full 168-member group. Members have been grumbling for a while that Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s participation has given the Jan. 6 committee ― which has started to subpoena RNC members and staff in its efforts to document Trump’s scheme to overturn his election loss ― the ability to call itself bipartisan.
“There’s a lot of criticism around here of Cheney and Kinzinger already,” said Nebraska committee member J.L. Spray.
Cheney, who has one of the most conservative voting records of any Republican in Congress, responded with a statement criticizing her party for its continued loyalty to Trump. “The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to ‘overturn’ a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,” she said. “History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what.”
The move to change the rules to require the 2024 nominee to boycott debates sponsored by the debate commission, meanwhile, appears to have broad support — even though it could put the GOP nominee at a disadvantage facing an incumbent Democrat seeking reelection.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the GOP nominee in 2012, for example got a major boost in his first debate against President Barack Obama, although his campaign later complained that the moderator for the second debate fact-checked one of his statements in real time.
Romney nonetheless told Business Insider recently that pulling out of the debates “would be nuts” and bad for voters. “The American people want to see candidates for president debating issues of consequence to them, and it provides a service to the country and to the people, to hear the prospective candidates of the two major parties duke it out,” he said.
Trump, who lacks knowledge about a vast array of issues important to the presidency, instead relied on extravagant boasts and personal insults in debates throughout his brief political career. While this approach worked for him in the 2016 GOP primaries where the audience egged on his attacks, it was less effective in the general election debates in both 2016 and 2020. Many observers believed Trump hurt his cause in all five of those encounters, most particularly during his first debate in 2020, in which Trump repeatedly and aggressively interrupted Democratic nominee Joe Biden, until Biden finally retorted: “Will you shut up, man?”
The debate commission said it would consider moving up the first debate in 2024 to before the start of early voting, as the RNC had asked, and would take the RNC’s claims of unfairness under consideration, but that it would not permit the RNC or any other party or group to take part in its board meetings, as the committee had demanded.
After the RNC made its rule-change threat public last month, the commission said it deals with the campaigns of the actual nominees, not political parties. It offered that same response to the RNC’s latest actions, which could result in final approval for its new rule at its summer meeting. “The CPD deals directly with candidates for president and vice president who qualify for participation in the CPD’s general election debates,” the commission said. “The CPD’s plans for 2024 will be based on fairness, neutrality and a firm commitment to help the American public learn about the candidates and the issues.”
Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol – his last-ditch attempt to remain in office ― killed five, including one police officer, injured another 140 officers and led to four police suicides.
He is now under investigation by federal and state officials in multiple jurisdictions.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has been conducting a civil probe of his family business, while the district attorney in Manhattan has been running a criminal investigation.
Meanwhile, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, has impaneled a special grand jury just to focus on Trump’s attempt to coerce state officials to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss of that state to Biden in 2020.
And the House Jan. 6 committee has been subpoenaing more and more former and current Trump aides to determine his precise role in that day’s events, while the Department of Justice last month confirmed that it is investigating at least one element of Trump’s scheme to remain in power: the submission of fake Trump “electors” in states that Biden won.
At a rally Saturday night, Trump asked his followers to stage “the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere” if prosecutors came after him, “because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
Despite this, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.