October 1, 2020 9:50:57 am
President Donald Trump participates in the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020 (Doug Mills / The New York Times).
Written by Alexander Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman
President Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn a far-right group in his first debate with Joe Biden sent a chill through the Republican Party at a critical moment in the 2020 campaign on Wednesday, as prominent lawmakers voiced displeasure at Trump’s conduct amid mounting fears that it could harm the party on Election Day.
It was the second time in two weeks that a group of party leaders broke with Trump for behavior they considered beyond the limits. Last week, Republicans distanced themselves from Trump’s unwillingness to promise a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
This time, the topic was racist extremism and the president’s response to a demand by Biden during Tuesday night’s debate that he denounce the Proud Boys, an organization linked to white supremacy and acts of violence. Trump responded by telling the group to “back off and stay alert,” a message that members of the organization took as virtual endorsement.
On Wednesday, Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said it was “unacceptable not to condemn white supremacists” without criticizing Trump by name, while Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said President it should “make it clear that the Proud Boys is a racist organization that opposes American ideals.”
The exchange on white supremacy provided one of the most inflammatory moments in a debate that unfolded as a chaotic showwhile Trump hijacked proceedings with interruptions and taunts that left elected officials, foreign observers, business leaders, grassroots voters, the moderator and one of the two candidates on stage excited by the indecent antics of a sitting president. The behavior led the commission that oversees presidential debates to say would make changes to the format for the remaining matchups this year, potentially including the ability to turn off a candidate’s microphone.
Trump’s rebellion, prompting Biden to call the president a clown” and telling him to “shut up” threatened to break new schisms in his political coalition and reinforce reservations about the character and leadership of the president who already has a large part of the electorate.
Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a veteran Republican and Native American lawmaker, said in an interview that Trump should denounce the Proud Boys and other extremist groups in plain language.
“All you have to say is, ‘There is no room for racial intolerance in this country,’ and be very blunt about it,” Cole said.
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Trump, in a brief encounter with reporters on Wednesday afternoon, tried to contain the damage while pausing long before turning his posture completely. Repeating a familiar ploy from past controversies, Trump insisted he knew nothing about the group, although he made no suggestion about it during the debate.
“I don’t know who the Proud Boys are,” Trump said. “I mean, you will have to give me a definition because I really don’t know who they are. I can only say that they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their job. “
Proud Boys rally at Delta Park in Portland, Oregon on September 26, 2020 (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi / The New York Times)
Trump also claimed that he had “always denounced any form” of white supremacist ideology, even though he has repeatedly resisted denouncing specific extremist figures and regularly echoed rhetoric from far-right and racist organizations.
Trump’s debate provocations were even more politically dangerous because they came at a time when he is lagging behind in polls in key states and millions of Americans are about to vote. Thirty states have begun voting early or have begun mailing ballots.
Within the Republican Party, Trump’s unwillingness to make a broad and forceful denunciation of right-wing extremism and white supremacy evoked the most damaging episodes of his presidency, such as his equivocal response to a violent 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville. , Virginia.
Still, there were no signs of a full Republican retreat from Trump, who during his tenure has been treated by most of his party as almost beyond reproach. Even those who disagreed with Trump on Wednesday did not directly rebuke him, a long-standing approach that prevents them from being pushed back by conservative voters and the president himself.
Some officials accused the media of clinging to an irrelevant issue.
“How many times do you have to say it if the question is, ‘Would you report it’ and the answer is yes?” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, House Minority Leader. “He did that.”
But it wasn’t just Trump’s response to the Proud Boys that had so many Republicans down on Wednesday.
Even Trump’s political allies acknowledged Wednesday that he had behaved brutally during the debate, turning his first confrontation with Biden, one of the few remaining opportunities for him to change career trajectory, into an orgy of insults and vitriol. staff against the first. vice president.
Read | ‘Worst debate ever’: lawmakers and experts react to the Biden-Trump presidential debate
In a sign of how disruptive and disrespectful Trump had been on Tuesday, the Committee on Presidential Debates, which is tasked with organizing the two remaining meetings between Trump and Biden, said it would make changes to the structure of future debates “to ensure a more orderly discussion “.
The Trump campaign responded by accusing the commission of “moving the goalposts” to aid Biden, stating in a statement that Trump had been “the dominant force” in the debate.
United States President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden participate in their first debate of the 2020 presidential campaign that was held on the Cleveland Clinic campus at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio , USA, September 29, 2020 (Reuters photo).
The president’s violent attack represented an unpleasant but useful gift for Biden, who entered the debate as the undisputed leader of the polls in the presidential race and emerged not entirely unscathed, but without any obvious damage to his status as front-runner.
Biden, who was traveling through Ohio and Pennsylvania on Wednesday, mostly withdrew from the cluttered forum, returning to an increasingly familiar message that presented the election as “a choice between the values of Scranton and Park Avenue.”
Trump himself was not displeased with his own performance, according to his advisers. Rather, he was elated by the debate and saw it as a successful outlet for him, according to three people close to the campaign. Some of Trump’s advisers, who avoid giving him bad news, did not attempt to disabuse the president of that assessment.
The advisers had tried to prepare Trump for a white supremacy question ahead of time, pointing out that Biden had made fighting racist violence of the kind that erupted in Charlottesville a central theme of his candidacy. Those preparedness efforts were unsuccessful, and some Trump advisers were candid in private that his intimidating performance recalled how he handled briefings with reporters about the coronavirus last spring, to his political detriment.
With just over a month left in the campaign, Republicans feared that Trump’s conduct would inevitably turn the election into a referendum on him and cause a carnage in other Republican candidates with groups of voters already deeply distrustful of the party: women, moderates, suburban voters and people of color. .
With his Senate majority hanging by a thread and House Republicans at risk of sinking deeper into the minority, party leaders urged Trump to do more in upcoming debates to tout his achievements in taxes, judges and politics. exterior in a way that could make the party palatable to voters at the political center.
“If the ‘suburban housewife’ he keeps talking about really is everything, it’s hard to think it wasn’t the other way around with her,” said former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam.
Republicans admitted that it would not be easy to stop Trump, whose approach to politics is driven largely by his instincts and personal grievances, and a deep aversion to criticizing anyone he has among his admirers, be it President Vladimir Putin from Russia. former Senate candidate Roy S. Moore of Alabama or conspiracy theory followers QAnon online.
Other Republicans were desperate not just for their party and its prospects in November, but for the country after a debate they felt represented a low point in American political history.
“I felt ashamed, that’s why I disconnected,” said Marc Racicot, former Montana governor and chairman of the Republican National Committee under former President George W. Bush. “I thought it was a demotion.”
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