If it was anyone’s night on the debate stage Wednesday, it was Nikki Haley’s. The former South Carolina governor was the focus of attacks from a struggling Ron DeSantis and an increasingly desperate Vivek Ramaswamy—as clear a reflection as any that she has the momentum in the second-place race. But like the first three primetime quarrels, the ultimate victor in the fourth GOP primary debate was the guy who wasn’t on the stage—and who leads those who were by about 30 points combined. “The fifth guy, who doesn’t have the guts to show up and stand here, he’s the one who is way ahead in the polls,” as Chris Christie, polling in the low single digits, pointed out during the showdown. “And yet I’ve got these three guys who are all seeming to compete with Voldemort, he who shall not be named.”
“They don’t want to talk about him,” Christie said.
The bickering bunch had little to say in response to Christie’s criticism, because he was right: For all the jabs the contenders have been eager to throw at one another, they continue to mostly pull punches when it comes to Donald Trump, who skipped the debate to joke to Sean Hannity that he would only abuse his power on “day one” of his potential return to power. “After that, I’m not a dictator,” the former president said.
Nothing that occurred on the stage in his absence Wednesday seemed likely to get in the way of this aspiring autocrat’s path to the GOP nomination. Haley, who passes for a moderate in this iteration of the Republican Party, endured her opponents’ barbs with poise. DeSantis—coming off a poor performance in an even more pointless debate against California Governor Gavin Newsom—leaned hard on his tired and grotesque culture war shtick. And Ramaswamy, frantically clinging to his undeserved relevance, went into all-out crank mode—confidently theorizing that the January 6 attack was an “inside job,” that climate change is a “hoax,” and that the “Great Replacement” theory is not some racist paranoia, but a “basic statement of the Democratic Party platform.”
“This is the fourth debate that you would be voted in the first 20 minutes as the most obnoxious blowhard in America,” Christie told Ramaswamy at one point, defending Haley from an attack on her “basic intelligence.” “So shut up for a little while.”
Christie, once again, was right. But it still doesn’t seem to be getting him anywhere in this race. As he made his case against Trump, noting the former president’s precarious legal position, the crowd jeered. “You can boo about it all you like,” Christie said, “and continue to deny reality.”
But denying reality is, at this point, a central tenet of the GOP. Election denialism, COVID denialism, climate change denialism—these kind of things animate the Republican Party nowadays. And while the GOP primary’s final four challengers all give voice to those elements in varying ways and to various degrees, none embody that nihilism more completely than Trump himself. Haley and her fellow contenders are looking to the Iowa caucus, six weeks away, to at least make Trump’s path to the nomination seem less inevitable. But even those tempered hopes may be fading: As Bloomberg News reported earlier this week, DeSantis has “privately acknowledged” that the frontrunner “holds so much sway over GOP voters that it leaves little room for alternative candidates” like himself. “The timing,” as allies told the outlet, “may not have been right for DeSantis to run.”
