Fox & Friends Pressures Trump to Participate in First GOP Primary Debate: ‘Show Up, Debate, and Shine!’
If former President Donald Trump was watching Fox & Friends Monday morning, he saw the co-hosts call on him to show up for the first GOP primary debate on Fox News.
Trump has repeatedly said that he will likely skip the first debates, citing his significant lead in GOP primary polls and reasonably arguing that his attendance could only end up helping his challengers. Trump made that point in an interview with Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday.
The segment featured a portion of Howard Kurtz’s interview with Ron DeSantis in which the Florida Governor, and Trump rival, called out the 45th president, saying:
We’ve been very frank at our differences with respect to the former president. I mean, for example, he promised to drain the swamp. It got worse. He did not drain the swamp. He promised to Bill have Mexico pay for a border wall. They did like 50 miles of wall. There’s massive expansive still there. He said he was going to eliminate the national debt. They added almost $8 trillion to the debt in four years. And of course, in 2020, he turned the country over to Dr. Fauci. And those lockdowns and the borrowing and printing really set us on a bad course. I’ve been very, very frank at that. But I have no interest in attacking Donald Trump or any of these other candidates. Personally, I think we’ve got to rise above that and focus on the issue once.
Following that clip, Brian Kilmeade called out DeSantis’s comments, saying, “I don’t think that that’s going to get anywhere. Everybody knows how hard Donald Trump worked on the swamp by himself, basically. And number two is the wall stop with the 40 miles of wall, the stuff that was replaced.” After sharing further details about “the wall,” Kilmeade said, “I think that Trump is vulnerable, but not in those areas.
But it was Steve Doocy who then took the lead in effectively pressuring the former president, saying, “Brian I think those points that you just made on behalf of Donald Trump, it would be great to see Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie just duke it out. That’s why they call it a debate. And then, you know, so many people have said, well, Donald Trump, an angel you recorded a while ago, he’s done so well in debates in the past. All right. Show up, debate, and shine. This is his big chance. All right. I’m just going to eliminate these two immediately.”
Kilmeade agreed, saying, “If he’s thinking he’s going to get the nomination, the best thing to do is to go into training. The best thing you have is an advantage over a current president. They don’t debate. And remember how bad Obama did in his first one in George Bush, 43, didn’t. His first one going for reelection Because you’re not used to the debate; you’re used to governing. And if he could keep himself shook up going into the maybe two or three that he has with Joe Biden, it would only help him.”
Doocy concluded on not quite a taunt of the former president but a reasonable prediction on how things might go, saying, “Well, if he doesn’t show up, then you are going to hear a constant, you know, people are going to say, what was he afraid of? Why didn’t he show up? Yeah, sitting on the lead. But we’re trying to figure out who exactly should be the next president.”
The underlying dynamic between Trump and the morning show that he used to appear on regularly, and was long thought to be his favorite cable news show, is fascinating to watch as the relationship between the former president and Fox News appears to be deteriorating.
It’s often said that avoiding getting into a fight with a guy holding a microphone is wise. Both Trump and Fox News hold microphones, but whose is bigger? Does size matter?
Watch above via Fox News.
