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Donald Trump has decided to skip the Republican presidential debates. That’s just as well: Debating Trump is demeaning to everyone involved, and it serves no purpose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• What happened to Wirecutter?
• What the ruling class fears
• Megan Rapinoe answers the critics.

Contempt for the Electoral Process

Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s skipping the Republican-primary debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. His decision makes political sense: A candidate who is crushing the entire field has little incentive to walk into a lion’s den and take on eight challengers. Of course, a candidate who cares about politics, policy, and the voters might want to show courage and respect for the electoral process—but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so those are not real considerations.

Strange as it may seem, I not only support Trump’s decision, but I think both parties should seize the opportunity to make it permanent for this election. I love debates and watch them attentively, and in a normal political year with a normal election and a normal candidate, I would be thumping the desk and saying that every candidate should respect our grand tradition of debate.

But this isn’t a normal year. It’s not a normal election. And Donald Trump is not, in any way, a normal candidate. To allow Trump onstage in either the primaries or the general election is bad politics, an insult to our electoral process, and corrosive to American democracy. All of the 2024 candidates, including President Joe Biden, have good reasons to embrace Trump’s refusal to debate and to shun any further interactions with him.

First, as we should have learned in 2016 and 2020, Trump has nothing but contempt for the electoral process. (I’ll get to his open attack on the process in 2021 in a moment.) Trump benefits from arenas where his opponents are constrained by rules that he himself ignores, and so he treats debates like performance art. He insults, interrupts, babbles, and pouts. In 2016 he stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage and suggested that he’d toss her in jail. In 2020, he tried to suck the oxygen out of the room—oxygen that Trump (according to his own chief of staff) knew was carrying his COVID infection and thus was a very real threat to Joe Biden’s health. Exasperated with Trump’s stream of blather, Biden spoke for many of us when he finally said: “Will you shut up, man?”

Second, to allow Trump on the stage is to admit that he is a legitimate candidate for public office. He is not.

I agree with—and this is quite the list—two lawyers who are members of the Federalist Society and the joint view of the conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law scholar Laurence Tribe when they argue that the Fourteenth Amendment bars Trump from office. I also agree, however, with my friend Charlie Sykes that the issue of constitutional disqualification is irrelevant: No one is going to take the measures needed (including, probably, a trip to the Supreme Court) to remove Trump from the ballot.

But as is the case with so much of our Constitution, the real check against someone like Trump is not black-letter law, but the inherent virtue and good sense of the American public. As James Madison long ago warned, if “there is no virtue among us” then “we are in a wretched situation,” and it is a continuing tragedy that millions of voters have failed to summon the basic decency to reject Trump and his assault on our values.

At the very least, the Republican Party (if it had a nanogram of spine left) would seize this moment to say that a candidate who bails out of the primary debates cannot run as a Republican and will get no assistance from the national party. The GOP under Ronna McDaniel (a woman who stopped using her family name of Romney professionally because of needling from Trump) is not going to take any such steps. But the failure of Republican voters and their cowardly leaders to exile Trump from their party—and from our public life—is no reason to treat Trump as if he is just another candidate.

Third, to allow Trump on a debate stage would, at this point, be an affront to the dignity of the Constitution and our republic. Trump’s antics would create yet another evening of both national and international humiliation and add more scar tissue to our already battered democratic norms. The United States—all of us—deserve better than to encourage such a demoralizing circus yet again.

And speaking of the Constitution and our political system: No candidate should have to share a stage and shake hands with a man who is credibly accused of multiple felonies for his efforts to overthrow the American constitutional order.

I am, even now, somewhat amazed even to write those words, but here we are.

Remember, Trump does not deny many of the things he is accused of doing. He (and at least some of his alleged co-conspirators) instead claim that what they did was not technically illegal. But we do not need a conviction to reach the conclusion that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms and the rule of law. We can shun him in public spaces, including the debate stage, for all of the acts to which he’s already admitted.

Think for a moment what it would look like if Trump showed up for any of the debates. You might not think much of Mike Pence, but no national purpose is served by asking Pence to walk onstage and smile and shake the hand of the man who supported a mob that was trying to hang him. And although it might be satisfying to watch Chris Christie strip the bark off Trump, a shouting match between two of the most obnoxious politicians in America would not help the voters, nor would it be a moment worthy of our democracy.

Likewise, it is beneath the dignity of President Biden—or any president of the United States—to stand next to Trump and have to pretend that the other podium is occupied by just another political contender instead of the leader of a party that has degenerated into a violent, seditionist cult. America knows both of these men, and knows what they stand for. The real question is whether a pro-democracy coalition will finally defeat Trump and his authoritarian movement, and we don’t need pointless and destructive debates to settle that issue.

Related:

• The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again.
• What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump

Today’s News

1. Donald Trump will turn himself in on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail, in his fourth arrest since April, and will be released after the booking process.
2. Tropical Storm Harold made landfall in South Texas today, with sustained winds of 50 miles per hour.
3. All eight passengers aboard a dangling cable car in Pakistan have been successfully rescued.

Dispatches

• Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question about the hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by Oliver Anthony, and how it’s been covered in the press.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Stop Pretending That Intensive Parenting Doesn't Work

By Nate G. Hilger

Since having our first kid two years ago, my wife and I have become the type of parents we used to pity: intensive parents. To an extent we didn’t anticipate, we have found ourselves pouring time into securing the best child care we can access, the best school district we can afford, the best health care for weird infections and rashes. We conduct relentless investigations into things we have no desire to think about: Should we get life insurance, and how much? And how does this boring-as-death policy actually work if we both, say, quit our jobs and die on a junket to Mexico? Should we let our kid face forward in his car seat a little early so that he’s more entertained on long drives, or is that actually dangerous? Exactly how far do we have to live from a freeway to avoid the worst hazards of air pollution?

Our kid barely knows how to use a fork. I have a hunch that in the hard-decision department, we’re only getting started.

Even as we’ve done all of this tedious work, I’ve often wondered: Is it really necessary?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Fear of an awkward president
• Audio: Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants “the truth about 9/11.”
• Millions of pages of documents is no reason to delay Trump’s January 6 trial.
• ​​A short clip can change your eye color or turn you into a soccer star.

Culture Break

Read. These seven books explore how marriage really works.

Watch. Twenty years on, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy has lost none of its ability to jar viewers—and is worth catching in theaters this summer.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This was a tough Daily to write, because I love political debates. I watched my first one of any kind when I was 15, the night Gerald Ford, in one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, claimed that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. (I was only in high school, but even I knew that was a gaffe.) I was in college when Ronald Reagan smiled and said, “There you go again,” to Carter. I was a graduate student in a tiny apartment when Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy. (On that one, I remember thinking it was a cheap shot but that Quayle had stuck his chin out and asked for it.)

But I also admit that I love debates because they’ve provided Saturday Night Live with some of its finest moments. I’ve watched the actual debates, and then watched priceless parodies, such as when Chevy Chase (as a clueless Ford) said, “It was my understanding that there would be no math.” I voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988, but I laughed out loud when Jon Lovitz (as Mike Dukakis) looked over at Dana Carvey’s Bush and deadpanned: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” I laughed—and cringed a tad—when Dan Aykroyd’s Bob Dole went after Al Franken’s Pat Robertson as a fraud and challenged him to heal his arm.

Unfortunately, nothing is funny about this election year (and with the actors and writers on strike, we might not get any new skits anyway), but I miss the days when debates were both important and worth parodying.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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