At CNBC’s Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, Donald Trump will once again face a member of the news media who will act as a moderator, but who long ago wrote off his campaign to win the GOP nomination.
In July, a month after Trump launched his campaign and watched his poll numbers climb to the top of the field, CNBC’s John Harwood said on Twitter that he didn’t think Trump could win the nomination.
If you are saying you don’t think Trump can win nomination or election, I agree with you https://t.co/2MwXNLRZ1w
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) July 21, 2015
“If you are saying you don’t think Trump can win nomination or election, I agree with you,” Harwood said, responding to someone who had called Trump a “feckless blowhard.”
Before that, Harwood said on Twitter that Trump “lacks the capacity” to inspire a movement like the one Ross Perot mobilized in 1992 as a third-party candidate.
Today, Trump continues to dominate every poll, save recent ones that show Ben Carson replacing him as the top choice among Republican voters in Iowa. And on Wednesday, Trump will face Harwood, who is one of three other moderators selected for the debate.
In previous debates, Trump has clashed hard with moderators who had publicly doubted him as a serious political player in the past.
Prior to CNN’s debate in September, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who would be serving as a panelist at the debate, said in a TV news interview that he didn’t believe Trump had the “temperament” to be president.
In a subsequent interview on Hewitt’s show before the debate, Trump was asked to identify various leaders of extremist militant groups in the Middle East. The next day, Trump accused Hewitt of asking an unfair question, calling him a “third-rate radio announcer.”
At the debate, facing Hewitt, Trump said that he believed the radio host was reading the names from their interview “off a sheet” and said that “there are few people anywhere, anywhere that would have known those names.”
Fox News hosted the first Republican debate in August, and a similar series of events unfolfed.
That debate was co-moderated by Chris Wallace, who had refused to interview Trump on his Sunday show in 2011, when Trump flirted with a White House bid before deciding against it. At the time, Wallace was the only national Sunday news show host who would not interview Trump, because he didn’t “want to be chasing what I think is a wild goose.”
At the Fox debate, Wallace asked Trump about bankruptcies he had faced in his decades-long business career. Trump fired back that he had never personally declared bankruptcy and told Wallace he was “living in a world of make believe.”
The next day, in an interview on NBC, Trump invoked Wallace’s father, the late newsman Mike Wallace.
He called Chris “a small shadow of his father.”
