Closing summary
The first debate of the Republican presidential primary season kicked off in Milwaukee, but the star of the show, Donald Trump, opted not to attend. He instead sat for a prerecorded interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that was posted to Twitter (recently renamed X) right as the Fox News-hosted debate began. On stage, the eight GOP candidates vying to overtake the ex-president in the polls, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former vice-president Mike Pence, made promises and pledges, while also engaging in a fair bit of bickering.
Here are the highlights:
Polls have recently shown a burst of support for Ramaswamy, even though he’s never won an election. On the debate stage, he was savaged by the crowd of veteran politicians, with Chris Christie comparing him to an AI, and Pence calling him a “rookie”.
Abortion divided the GOP candidates, with some arguing the issue should be left up to the states to deal with.
Almost every candidate at the debate said they would support Trump if he was the nominee, even if he was convicted of a crime. The only one who declined was Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson. The Republican National Committee, however, had already made all who qualified for the debate sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee.
Ramaswamy stridently argued against providing more military aide to Ukraine, sparking an argument with Pence and an admonishment from the moderators.
DeSantis is polling in second place to Trump, but was surprisingly muted at the debate. When it came time to discuss border security, he piped up, vowing to leave drug traffickers “stone cold dead”.
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Donald Trump Jr compared Fox News to the Fulton county district attorney after he was blocked by security from entering the post-debate “spin room”.
Don Jr and fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle were moving through press room when a burly security guard blocked their path and told them to go no further. “So Fox is not letting us into the rest of the room, just so we’re clear,” he told reporters, his voice trembling with emotion. “So Fox is functioning like the Fulton county DA right now, trying to ban people from actually having discourse about politics.”
Guilfoyle added: “How un-American.”
Don Jr, who has not appeared on Fox News for a year, continued: “Probably shouldn’t surprise any of us, but that’s what it is, and I’ve been told by others that I would be able to go in … They’re telling me right now, Fox won’t let me into the spin room.”
He added: “I’’m not allowed to go in there because the candidates that they’ve been boosting while simultaneously trying to cut down Trump for the last two years didn’t perform as they had hoped. So they can’t have someone who can maybe be a representative of my father.”
Don Jr talked to reporters in the main press area instead and defended his father’s decision to skip the debate. “If you’re a political strategist and if you have a brain, if you have a 60-point lead dominating a field, you don’t go into a setup.”
Don Jr rated Vivek Ramaswamy as the winner of the debate and claimed that Ron DeSantis had the worst night. “He sat there like a wallflower, basically got ambushed on all sides and everything that he said that actually got some applause was literally already Trump policy.
“‘We use the military to fight the cartels. It’s a threat to our nation.’ That’s Trump policy. ‘Our nation is in decline, our nation’s in decline, our nation’s in decline’ – literally from the Trump campaign website. He’s not capable of those original thoughts so he takes an idea that works and tries to make it his own. But I didn’t see a single idea, and again, I didn’t see him prosecute the case of how he’s going to beat Joe Biden.”
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