A Fox News Debate That Skimped on ‘the Elephant Not in the Room’

The candidates were clashing and the Milwaukee crowd was getting rowdy. After an hour of policy discussion, the first Republican primary debate of 2023 had turned chaotic when the Fox News moderators brought up “the elephant not in the room.”

Donald J. Trump was not onstage on Wednesday, but the mere mention of his name created fireworks. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, urged Republicans “to stop normalizing” the former president’s conduct. His rival Vivek Ramaswamy responded that Mr. Trump was “the best president of the 21st century.” A sleepy debate had yielded to a gloves-off battle over the future of the Republican Party.

As the audience drowned out Mr. Christie with boos, Bret Baier, one of the moderators, paused and turned in his chair.

“The more time we spend doing this, the less time they can talk about issues you want to talk about,” the anchor told the audience, like a headmaster scolding fidgety students. “So let’s just get through this.”

It was an eat-your-vegetables moment that underlined the tensions and contradictions of an awkward evening for Fox News.

Mr. Trump’s four criminal indictments and his denial of the 2020 election results are undoubtedly newsworthy. But many conservatives who watch the network are hostile to open criticism of Mr. Trump. Roughly 10 minutes after Mr. Baier asked the first question about Mr. Trump, his co-moderator, Martha MacCallum, abruptly informed the candidates that they would be “moving on.”

Traditionally a chief gatekeeper for candidates in a Republican primary, Fox News had to stage its debate without the party’s most important figure, who is nursing a feud with the network. Mr. Trump even arranged counterprogramming: He pretaped a friendly interview with the ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson that was posted on X, formerly Twitter, just as Fox’s broadcast began.

“We’ll get bigger ratings using this crazy forum that you’re using than probably the debate, our competition,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Carlson, a boast that, in true Trump fashion, was factually dubious and doubled as a slight.

Mr. Trump had plenty of reasons to dodge the Fox debate: He would rather not lend his spotlight to lesser-known rivals, and the criminal proceedings against him had raised the risks of offhand comments on live TV.

Still, Mr. Trump’s decision to appear in an online video, instead of a nationally televised debate, reflected the changing role of cable news in presidential campaigns, where mass media has yielded some of its gatekeeper powers to more niche outlets aimed at die-hard fans, not swing voters.

Eight years ago, Fox News drew a record 24 million viewers for the first debate of the 2016 Republican primary. Americans tuned in to gawk at Mr. Trump, then a novelty, who dominated the evening with tasteless attacks on Rosie O’Donnell and a fiery clash with the moderator Megyn Kelly, who attempted to hold Mr. Trump to account for his misogynistic behavior.

At the time, Mr. Trump’s name-calling and aggressive presence were an anomaly in the relatively civil arena of presidential debates. On Wednesday, his legacy could be seen in the broadsides of candidates like Mr. Christie, who compared Mr. Ramaswamy to a human version of ChatGPT. (The only audible expletive came from an off-color lyric in “Rich Men North of Richmond,” the popular country song and conservative anthem that Fox News played ahead of the night’s first question.)

Privately, Fox News management downplayed Mr. Trump’s absence on Wednesday night, although the network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, visited Mr. Trump at his New Jersey club this month to try to persuade him to appear. On Wednesday, the Fox moderators earned some praise for asking a string of substantive questions on subjects ranging from abortion rights to climate change to former Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

This was not the first time that Mr. Trump had snubbed a major Fox event. In January 2016, on the eve of the crucial Iowa caucuses, Mr. Trump pulled out of a network debate because Ms. Kelly was set to be one of the moderators. “Let’s see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me,” he taunted at the time.

Mr. Trump went on to narrowly lose the caucuses. He showed up for Fox’s next primary debate in March, and after he won the nomination, the network’s prime-time commentators embraced him, proving that media stars and star politicians share at least one key attribute: adaptability.

Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent covering the intersection of business, culture and politics. More about Michael M. Grynbaum

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