Can you feel the excitement? We’re this close to ending the presidential-debate circuses. And here we thought that it might be too late to stop…
Can you feel the excitement? We’re this close to ending the presidential-debate circuses. And here we thought that it might be too late to stop the degradation of American political culture!
This started yesterday after DNC chair Tom Perez took a moment out from his fundraising failures to announce that Democrats wouldn’t trust Fox News to run a primary debate in the next year-plus. Despite the fact that Fox hasn’t hosted a Democratic presidential primary debate since the 2004 cycle, the dig got the attention Perez wanted. It even prompted this reaction from Donald Trump himself overnight:
Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate. Good, then I think I’ll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7,2019
Gee, I wonder which networks fit the initials ‘FNN’? Three guesses, but Trump’s animosity goes well beyond CNN. At one time or another he’s called every network “fake news” except Fox. If the eventual Democratic candidate won’t go on Fox and Trump won’t go anywhere else, that could spell the end of televised presidential debates.
Well, theoretically, anyway. Is it just an idle threat? Perhaps not, the New York Times reported, although the example they have carries some irony:
The president often tweets idle threats. But his message raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could boycott a debate in the 2020 race if he took issue with the network affiliation of a chosen moderator.
