The one clear takeaway from Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate was that the dynamic of the campaign has changed. The evidence for this is never in what the campaigns say, but in how they behave.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have each clearly identified the other as the man to beat for the nomination. When the two of them got into a fight over immigration, they seemed to be the only ones on the stage. It took a question from the moderators to bring Donald Trump into a conversation about his campaign’s main and defining issue. One might have otherwise overlooked Trump, at least in that space of several minutes.
It made the Trump-centric questions from the moderators, which Trump himself actually complained about, seem somewhat out of place. On the other hand, the candidates who did spend their ammo attacking Trump were the ones no one would have missed had they slipped out to the bar in mid-debate for a pint. That group included Rand Paul, John Kasich, and yes, Jeb Bush, even though he had a better debate than he has in the past.
How have Rubio and Cruz reached the conclusion that they should engage one another and not bother with Trump? The trajectory of campaign polling in Iowa supports it, for Cruz might now be considered the front-runner there.
But there is another reason, and it was Bush, in his futile effort to combat the real estate magnate head-on, who perhaps put his finger most firmly on the fundamental reason. He argued that unlike Trump, “I know what I don’t know.”
Trump, who is not an unintelligent man, is embarrassingly unwilling to familiarize himself with the issues, but all too willing to discuss them. It’s almost as if he considers himself above the task of learning anything.
This was obvious long before Tuesday night’s debate in, for example, his roll out of his Muslim-free-American policy. At first, last week, Trump insisted that he would exclude Muslim Americans from re-entering their own country. Naturally, this policy withered and changed as soon as it was exposed to the light of rational scrutiny. There are dozens of examples that make it clear Trump starts talking without first reading his own policy papers.
During the debate, Trump was actually booed for his previously articulated and half-baked plan of “closing the Internet in some way” to combat the Islamic State. The most worrying part of this suggestion in the context of the presidential race is that Trump doesn’t appear to have even a casual user’s knowledge of the Internet.
“I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” Trump said, describing the Internet as if it were a large piece of land with clearly marked spots controlled by the Islamic State. “I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our Internet.” It is impossible to guess what he is proposing here. His statement is analogous to that of the person who says there’s too much chlorine in the gene pool, a clear sign that that person doesn’t know what a “gene pool” is.
At another point in the debate, Trump made it fairly obvious that he doesn’t know what the “nuclear triad” is, even after the moderators and other candidates in the debate made it clear that the phrase referred to the strategic deployment of nuclear weapons in submarines, airplanes, and missile silos. Still, however, Trump was willing to wing it when asked about how he would upgrade these strategic components. His rambling and incoherent answers eventually fizzled out with an abject, “I think for me nuclear — the power, the devastation is very important to me.”
It was a fantastic example of Trump being someone who does not know what he does not know. He also couldn’t bring himself to admit it and ask for clarification of the question. Note that the root of the word “arrogance” is the idea of a person who is too proud to ask for help. Trump has become better on the stump, but his huge inadequacies for the job of president are exposed when he is put on the spot in debates.
Ignorance and arrogance have not damaged him yet, and that has made it clear to Cruz and Rubio, who are the really serious candidates — those that take politics seriously and also have a serious chance of winning — that their principal challenge comes from each other.
And the presidency is a serious thing. As the campaign takes shape and Republican voters weigh the candidates in earnest, it is our sincere hope that they will consider not only whether the candidates agree with them on the issues, but also whether they have the slightest idea of what those issues mean, or whether they just make things up as they go along.
If they do, then an exciting and protracted primary battle will end with a nominee who can not only win but also can be counted on to have a clue about the issues he or she will confront.
