Since the political class is still in a quandry over how Donald Trump keeps rolling even as he does things they are sure will bring about his end, let's use tomorrow night's Fox News debate as the perfect case in point. Trump is apparently going to skip the debate because of his antipathy toward Megyn Kelly, or hers toward him, or whatever. Upon learning this, the entire world of political people immediately went into overdrive analyzing the move.
Is it shrewd? Does this present an opening for Cruz? Does he look like a baby? How will he explain how he can handle Putin when he can't handle Megyn Kelly?
It would be an unprecedented move if Trump withdrew from the debate at such a consequential moment on the primary calendar.
Trump long has objected to the participation of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as one of the three moderators, claiming she has treated him unfairly with both her questioning of him at last August’s debate and her commentary since then.
Trump also said that a “wise-guy press release” that the network issued earlier on Tuesday belittling him was inappropriately antagonistic and childish.
Fox’s statement said that network officials “had learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president.”
The statement added that Trump “has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”
After reading it, Trump said: “I said, ‘Bye-bye.’ ”
Of course, Trump is now dominating all the debate-related news coverage, which will get the attention of some of the chattering class. But even that is more beside the point than they think it is. The fact of the matter is that most normal people don't even watch these debates, and they certainly don't obsess over the strategic maneuverings that lead up to them.
I'm sure some of you are tired of me hating on the debates because you lap them up just like Walking Dead fans won't miss a minute of these people walking around with their arms falling off. But I hate on them because they almost never reveal anything that's useful to a voter trying to make a serious decision about who would make the best president.
That's why Trump finds it more useful to create and control drama surrounding a debate than he does to actually participate in it. And that's why his supporters don't care that he does. What are we going to find out in his or anyone else's response to "tough questions" from a journalist that we couldn't find out just from reading about what they say on the campaign trail every day.
Cruz's weird comment about "New York values" in the last debate was a perfect example. It was an ill-advised shot at the nation's largest city, and it set up Trump for a very effective retort. But so what? What did it tell us? The point Cruz was trying to make was Trump is from a liberal city whereas he, Cruz, is very conservative. And we already knew that. It was mildly compelling theater, I guess, but in no way informative.
Most of the people who are going to vote for Trump will be watching Bones or Grey's Anatomy on Thursday night, because they're not political junkies and they don't expect to learn anything from the debate either. Most who are political junkies have already made up their minds about Trump anyway.
So Trump will come in for all kinds of criticism for skipping the debate - both from the political press and from his rivals - and the political class will be all abuzz about it, more so than they are about the content of the debate itself. And it won't matter, not so much because Trump won the news cycle by bailing, but more because the debates really don't matter nearly as much as the political class wants to think they do.
