Cancel the 2024 Presidential Debates if Trump Is the GOP Nominee

He turns them into delusional shitshows that do more harm than good.

(Photo credit: MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)

NIKKI HALEY DID America a YUGE favor with her bold move on debates. She said she wouldn’t debate in New Hampshire unless Donald Trump agreed to participate, and of course he didn’t. Both ABC and CNN promptly canceled primary debates they’d planned for Thursday and Sunday, and thank you for that, network gods.

Now can we agree that if Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, we will scrap the three general-election debates scheduled for September and October?

In theory, debates are the gold standard of journalists holding presidential candidates to account and voters getting to assess their policy views and political skills, all in an unscripted setting. And they can be valuable, no question. The 2024 Republican primary debates helped millions get familiar with this year’s cast of auditioners, for better (Haley and Chris Christie) and worse (Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy).

But Trump’s absence is what allowed that to happen. His media appearances—in debates, town halls, video interviews, and even trials in courtrooms—are loaded with grievance, insults and, worst of all, distortions and outright falsehoods. He steamrolls moderators, journalists, rivals, and judges by interrupting, ignoring time limits and legal procedure, talking over people and trying to drown them out, and generally violating every rule designed to keep things organized and civil.

The outcome is never pretty. As media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote after his own network’s town hall last May with Trump, “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.” Interviewer Kaitlan Collins tried, but Trump’s floods of fiction and hyperbole cascaded right past her.

No one could have stopped it, or him. Even a federal judge—U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan—threatened to deport Trump from his courtroom last week after the defendant audibly complained about “a witch hunt” and “a con job.” Kaplan warned the former president against being “disruptive” and added, “You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently.”

Seriously, when, where, and in what circumstance has Trump ever shown discipline or self-control?

Clinical psychologist Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, says she watched her tragic family history play out “on a grand scale” in the 2016 campaign. Fred Trump was harsh and abusive toward his eldest son, Freddy; paid little attention to his second son, Donald; and his wife was ill and absent much of the time, she wrote in her 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

The future president reacted by developing behaviors like “bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness,” and they hardened into personality traits—“because once Fred started paying attention to his loud and difficult second son, he came to value them,” Mary Trump wrote.

He became bolder and more aggressive because he was rarely challenged or held to account by the only person in the world who mattered—his father. Fred liked his killer attitude, even if it manifested as bad behavior.

That set the pattern—“the through line” in Mary Trump’s phrase—that Americans now know so well: active encouragement and rewards for “increasingly crass, irresponsible, and despicable behavior” in business, television, politics, and life.

It manifested when, in a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump followed her around the stage as she answered audience questions in what observers described variously as prowling, skulking, looming, lurking, and stalking. “My skin crawled,” Clinton wrote in her 2017 memoir.

A 2020 debate with Joe Biden was more like a 90-minute barrage of interruptions and crosstalk, despite moderator Chris Wallace’s best efforts. An exasperated Biden lasted barely 15 minutes before he exclaimed to the sitting president, “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential!”

Trump’s performance in that September 29 debate was so frenetically unhinged that some speculated that he was developing COVID at the time. It turns out that he had indeed tested positive and then negative three days earlier, skipped a test he was supposed to take before the debate, tested positive again on October 1, and was flown to Walter Reed Medical Center the next day for treatment.

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THE THING IS, TRUMP IS UNHINGED in the best of times and health. He’s at his worst when he has no constraints at all—on social media, in press conferences, and at campaign rallies. Anything goes in those venues, and as millions of journalists, fact-checkers, legal experts, and everyday Americans have found, you can’t keep up. The deluge is deliberate.

Consider just a couple of the many tales Trump spun at a November 20 rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a few weeks before the caucuses he won by 30 points:

• “We have a crooked president who gets money from China.” There is no evidence that Joe Biden received money from China as a president, vice president, or private citizen. But on January 4, a report from House Democrats showed that, in an apparent violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, Trump while president received $7.8 million from twenty foreign governments, including over $5.5 million from the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises. And that was based on records from only four of his five hundred businesses and two of his four years in office.

• “We’re taking in hundreds of billions of dollars because of tariffs I put on China. . . . I did get Iowa and farmers, I got the farmers, and actually some manufacturers came out of it, too. $28 billion, right? 28 billion.” Studies show that U.S. consumers and companies paid the tariffs, about $40 billion annually. The money Trump bragged about China giving to U.S. farmers was actually a massive taxpayer bailout that analysts said had grown unsustainable. He was fact-checked on this after an October 2020 debate but is still peddling it. (Biden kept many of the tariffs, but took other steps against China and has seen farmer income rise on his watch.)

There were countless other untethered moments at this single event in Iowa—from “uncontrolled inflation” that’s “killing us” (it had been declining for the last eighteen months), to Trump’s unique ability to instantly end the Russia-Ukraine war (“We’re going to get it settled. I know Putin very well, get along with him. I know Zelensky very well. I’m the only candidate who can make this promise to you”), to the incessant, unforgivable Big Lie that “We won the first one and we won the second one even bigger and we got screwed.”

That’s Trump free to create the world according to Trump. Yet as we’ve seen, he does the same thing when he is on a stage or a set with minders assigned to impose order and call out lies.

Given that Trump has snubbed all primary-season debates so far, the chaos he brought to the 2020 debates with Biden, his behavior with Clinton, and—it must be said—his increasingly incoherent and confused ramblings, why offer Trump maximum exposure on prestige platforms? Has he earned it?

Beyond that, who would benefit from a Trump–Biden debate rematch, besides Trump? Whom would it serve?

Not the Fox viewers and rallygoers who take Trump’s every word as gospel truth. A debate would only spark more mistrust and hostility toward any person or group trying to correct or rein in their revenge-seeking savior-hero.

Definitely not the rest of us trapped in a fraught, seemingly endless cycle of reckonings, betrayals, and disappointments.

Only trials and elections can stop that cycle. Trump can (and will) use his trials as campaign tools. He’s already doing it. If he’s the nominee, he won’t need debates, and neither will America. Not this time.