As previously signaled, the Republican National Committee is now vowing it won't be letting its candidates participate in the presidential debates traditionally organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates. This was announced in a suitably blustery tweet by sedition supporter Ronna McDaniel, a tweet in which McDaniel says the party will "find newer, better debate platforms" so that their candidates will not have their fee-fees hurt by the "biased" commission:
HA HA HA HA—sorry, sorry. Ahem.
Well, we can take "newer, better debate platforms" to mean they're going to find the griftiest grift out there, demanding that all the candidates "debate" on Trump's rickety new "social network," or from within a fort made entirely of MyPillows, or on whatever "platform" happens to be most favored by white supremacist groups when debate season next rolls around.
Mostly, however, this is a telegraphed move meant to protect Donald Trump, because four years of Trumpian purges have turned the Republican National Committee into a group that protects the interests of Donald Trump and only Donald Trump, and Donald Trump has no intention of debating anyone. The RNC has been telegraphing such a move for a long, long time, and they've done so while parroting Trump's own paranoia-laced language about the debate commission being "biased" and "unfair" to him.
He didn't like the questions he was asked the last time around, he didn't like moderators challenging him, and he got into a particular spat when he showed up with a likely active case of COVID-19 for a debate with Joe Biden and refused to be tested. Trump was hospitalized shortly afterward with a raging COVID case, but pulled through, going on to kill hundreds of thousands more Americans before eventually ending his term with an attempted coup. There, you're caught up.
So this move is being made exclusively because Donald Trump again intends to run for the presidency. Donald Trump has already signaled that he won't be debating this time around, so the RNC needs to invent some justification for why he'll be doing so that's a bit more creative than "because he's a tremendous damn coward." That doesn't solve the other problem, however, which is making sure none of the other presidential contenders upstage Donald by attending debates themselves.
So the RNC is taking care of that one, too. Also as previously expected, the RNC has also voted to require Republican presidential candidates to sign a pledge to only appear at party-approved debates. Those who break their vow by debating in a non-approved venue will be sanctioned by being removed from any future party-sanctioned debates, presuming the party ever bothers to sanction any.
To translate, the Republican National Committee, which has been purged of anyone who does not hew mercilessly to Donald Trump's personal whims and announced fantasies, is saying that they will be boycotting the traditional presidential debates and that all the non-Donald Trump candidates are hereby barred from debating each other in any venue that Trump's party allies haven't personally given their permission for.
Wow, that sounds like a rather amazing boon for ... Donald Trump. And it effectively gives Trump veto power over every debate format and venue, because anything he personally refuses to participate in will be marked down as "unapproved" by RNC heads so as to protect him from looking bad. Or, at least, to protect him from looking even worse.
All of that said, this announcement isn't worth much. It can be undone at the drop of a hat, and if something happens that prevents Treasonboy from seeking office again, the new rules will become whatever the new frontrunner wants them to be. For the moment, however, this is a big, big thumb on the scales for Trump and against Mike Pence (who will never, ever be the party nominee no matter how much he imagines it) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (who has been quickly morphing into Donald Trump by copying both his gestures and his paranoias, and would likely become the frontrunner if Donald Trump fell down a Florida sinkhole while golfing and couldn't be fished out.)
This is what you get with a cult of personality: a party with no platform, no ideology other than whatever Dear Leader last tweeted, and new rules adjusted however they need to be in order to make Dear Leader a slightly less embarrassing figure when possible. Donald can't stand confrontation and especially doesn't want anyone talking about the long, long list of things he screwed up or corrupted during his first term, so the party is going to make everybody else sign a pledge promising they'll only attend "debates" with moderators hand-picked to ensure those things don't come up.
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