It was the fourth debate for the four of the five who remain and want to be the Republican presidential candidate in next year’s election. Not much suggests that any of them can win the race against the one who skipped the debates – former president Donald Trump.
While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie clashed in a televised debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Donald Trump was busy raising campaign money in Florida.
There are only six weeks left until the first primary election and opinion polls show a large lead for the former president.
Chris Christie has consistently been the most critical of Trump and the ex-president’s problems with prosecutions and lawsuits in everything from civil cases over fraudulently inflated values, to attempts at voter fraud and calls to storm Congress.
The other aspiring presidential candidates have been considerably less, if at all, critical.
– Anyone who cannot take on Trump should not be president, Christie said in the debate the day after Trump stated that he would only be dictator for a day if he becomes the Republican presidential candidate and wins the election in a year.
Christie criticized his three counter-debaters for going around pretending that it was just the four of them and that Trump doesn’t exist.
Trump has skipped all debates and has justified it by saying that he does not want to give his competitors any attention.
A representative of the campaign organization Make America great again, Karoline Leavitt, said that the race for second place (read: Trump is unchallenged first) is the biggest waste ever in politics of time, money and energy.
– They (the four in the debate) engage in a mock fight to satisfy their egos and the billionaires who control them like puppets, says Leavitt.