‘This Is Nonsense’: Former GOP Senator Serving on Debate Commission Pens Op-Ed Firing Back at Trump

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A former Republican senator serving on the Commission on Presidential Debates has penned an op-ed for The Washington Post responding to attacks on the commission’s credibility from President Donald Trump and his campaign.

Former Senator John Danforth writes that he wanted to keep his “strict vow of silence” but “felt compelled to respond” to the attacks.

“The president’s apparent strategy is to challenge the validity of the election should he lose,” he writes, connecting that to Trump’s attacks on the debate commission and the Republican attacks overall going after the moderators and accusing the commission of bias.

Danforth acknowledges he’s been publicly critical of Trump but says, “[T]he conclusion that any commission member would eschew fair play to push a partisan position is, to put it mildly, ironic. The same people who decline to extend the presumption of fairness to members of the commission rightly assert that Amy Coney Barrett will put aside her personal beliefs on the Supreme Court.”

The Trump campaign went after the commission a few weeks ago over its plans to make the second debate — which was ultimately cancelled — virtual following the president’s coronavirus diagnosis.

Danforth says the decision was made based on health concerns and salls the idea this was to help Biden is “nonsense,” adding that if he really wanted to help Biden, “the last thing on my mind would have been to restrain the technique President Trump exhibited in the first debate.”

This week the Trump campaign publicly swiped at the commission for not making the final debate foreign policy-focused. The letter publicly posted by campaign manager Bill Stepien — citing Trump’s own foreign policy accomplishments and swiping at Biden over issues like China — reads, “As is the long-standing custom, and as had been promised by the Commission on Presidential Debates, we had expected that foreign policy would be the central focus of the October 22 debate.”

Danforth says, “It’s also nonsense to suggest that the commission has allowed the Biden campaign to steer the final debate away from foreign policy. As the Trump campaign knows, subject matter for the debates is outside the commission’s province and is chosen solely by the moderators.”

He concludes saying the commission is not above criticism, but that “there’s an enormous difference between criticizing good-faith efforts and accusing the commission of corrupt favoritism”:

It is not the honor of the commission that is at stake here. What is at stake is Americans’ belief in the fairness of our presidential debates and, in turn, the presidential election. When that faith is undermined, the damage to our country is incalculable.

The commission was also criticized by the Trump campaign for its plan to mute mics during the other’s two-minute initial responses on the subjects chosen. Commission co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf defended that move and said it’s not a new rule, just an enforcement of what the campaigns already agreed to.