Republicans tear into Ramaswamy as Trump absence looms over combative first debate

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Anyone who thought Donald Trump’s absence from the first Republican primary debate would make for a boring time was almost certainly reconsidering that prediction by the time anchors Bret Baier and Martha McCallum called for the first commercial break after roughly half an hour on Wednesday.

Just minutes into the debate, standing on the same stage at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum where the GOP’s presidential nominee will deliver his or her acceptance speech next year, the eight candidates left the two Fox anchors flummoxed at times by quickly slinging insults and call-outs, drawing cheers and boos from a crowd of Wisconsin Republicans.

The source of the rancour? A question from the anchors to Vivek Ramaswamy, the political neophyte and ex-biotech entrepreneur who has drawn an increasing amount of support behind the frontrunners, Mr Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

Asked why voters should choose him over “more experienced” politicians, Mr Ramaswamy responded by cribbing a line from Barack Obama’s keynote address to a Democratic convention nearly two decades ago, in which he called himself “a skinny kid with a funny name”. He told the moderators it was time for an “outsider” rather than “the professional politicians in the Republican Party”.

When it was time for Mr Pence to respond, the former vice president and Indiana governor — whose public persona has long been one of a taciturn midwesterner who speaks in Reaganesque platitudes, delivered a series of prepared lines about his experience in public office and highlighted his conservative bona fides dating back to his years as a House member.

After Mr Ramaswamy jumped in say how he was “not sure” that he’d understood what Mr Pence had said, the veteran conservative pounced.

He turned to Mr Ramaswamy, who is nearly three decades his junior, and offered to explain himself again.

“I’ll go slower this time,” he said.

After Mr Pence repeated some details of his record as a leader of House conservatives, he remarked that today is “not the time for on-the-job training” for a president.

“We don’t need to bring in a rookie,” he said.

The former biotech executive, who has spent most of his improbable presidential run articulating positions that are little different from those supported by the former president, appeared to reel at times from the intensity of the attacks from the “professional politicians” he was using his speaking time to insult and belittle.

After Mr Ramaswamy interrupted the rest of the field to claim the rest of the candidates were “bought and paid for” and call climate change a “hoax,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie stepped in to say he’d “had enough” of the newcomer, who he said “sounds like ChatGPT,” and pointed out that Mr Ramaswamy had lifted a line from Mr Obama.

“The last person in one of these debates ... who stood in the middle of the stage and said ‘what’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here’ was Barack Obama, and I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur,” he said.

Over the two-hour session, the topics Baier and McCallum pressed the candidates on ranged from how to address America’s sovereign debt, to federal education policy, to Unidentified Flying Objects.

But the constant throughout appeared to be the visible dislike for Mr Ramaswamy exhibited by Mr Pence, Mr Christie, and ex-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who eviscerated the 38-year-old entrepreneur when the topic turned to US support for Ukraine.

Ms Haley, who served as Ambassador to the United Nations under Mr Trump, was asked to explain why she believes the US should continue to support Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russia’s invading forces shortly after Mr Ramaswamy hit out at Mr Pence and Mr Christie for their recent visits to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and disparaged the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “pope” for “professional politicians”.

She replied that America’s chief executive “needs to have moral clarity” and “know the difference between right and wrong” as well as between “good and evil”.

“When you look at the situation with Russia and Ukraine, here you have a pro-American country that was invaded by a thug,” she said.

“A win for Russia is a win for China. We have to know that Ukraine is the first line of defence for us. And the problem that Vivek doesn’t understand that — he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan, he wants to go and stop funding Israel,” she continued as she laid into her opponent, adding that “you don’t do that to friends”.

In response, Mr Ramaswamy insulted Ms Haley by accusing her of posturing for a “future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon”.

The former South Carolina governor pounced once more, turning to face Mr Ramaswamy and telling him: “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows”.

The two-hour shout fest, which took place roughly five months before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus kicks off the 2024 election season in January, went down without the GOP frontrunner, Mr Trump, who eschewed the free-for-all with his primary rivals in favour of a sit-down with a sycophantic interviewer, former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson.

Mr Trump, who on Thursday is expected to surrender at the Fulton County, Georgia jail to be arrested, fingerprinted and photographed following his indictment on racketeering and other criminal charges — the fourth such surrender to authorities since April — has said he should not have to participate in debates because of the size of his lead among most polls of Republican primary voters.

But the ex-president’s absence was, as Baier quipped at one lighter moment, an “elephant not in the room” — and at one point the source of some of the most contentious exchanges between the candidates.

One of the contenders on stage, Mr Pence, is expected to be a witness in at least one of Mr Trump’s four upcoming criminal trials next year. Two of them — Mr Pence and Ms Haley — served in Mr Trump’s administration but are now attempting to supplant him as the GOP’s standard-bearer, and a third — Mr Christie — was once a close ally of the ex-president but has become a fierce critic as the legal jeopardy facing Mr Trump has grown.

While Mr Christie and another GOP contender, Asa Hutchinson, have condemned Mr Trump for the actions which have led him to face Indictments in four separate jurisdictions, the majority of candidates on stage expressed at least some degree of allegiance to the twice-impeached, quadruply-indicted former president in response to a show-of-hands question on whether they’d support him if he wins the nomination.

When Mr Christie’s visible non-expression of support elicited boos from the Trump-friendly debate audience, the ex-governor said “someone” has “got to stop normalising” Mr Trump’s allegedly illicit conduct, which he called “beneath the office of President of the United States”.

When the crowd continued to boo him, he interjected that the “great thing” about America is that “booing is allowed,” but he added that the booing “doesn’t change the truth” about Mr Trump.

As the debate wrapped and surrogates for each candidate filed into a post-debate “spin room” to explain why their respective candidates had won the debate, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung made a case to The Independent that it was the man who wasn’t there who had actually carried the day.

He said the ex-president “clearly won the debate without actually having to be on the debate stage” because his interview with Carlson had been viewed roughly eighty million times on X, the platform once known as Twitter.

“It’s clear that we came out on top,” he said.

Mr Cheung said Mr Trump’s commanding lead in the primary was an indicator that his campaign — and the GOP in general — needs to shift to a general election footing and begin targeting President Joe Biden rather than each other.

“I think right now what we're focused on is making sure we're messaging this as a general election that this is going to be President Trump versus President Biden or whoever the Democrats pick,” he said. “That's the most important thing. And we need a pivot — we need to start fighting President Biden”.