The first Republican presidential primary debate for the 2024 US election race is set to air on Wednesday evening on Fox networks. Eight candidates are expected to attend the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, event, but missing will be the clear pack leader, former US President Donald Trump.
The candidates expected to appear are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis; North Dakota Governor Dough Burgum; former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley; former US Vice President Mike Pence; former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie; former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson; US Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina; and New York-based entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ajamu Baraka, international human rights activist, organizer, political analyst, and the national organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, told Radio Sputnik on Tuesday that Trump’s absence could potentially be read as good or bad by his supporters, but that it was certainly bad for the legitimacy of the US political system for Trump to be facing such transparently political charges designed to stop his participation in politics.
“There could be a backlash from either supporters of Trump if they believe this represents a certain kind of arrogance or it could be the opposite, that people believe that what the Republican candidates should do is to rally around the presumptive nominee of their party,” Baraka said.
“For Trump and his campaign, it’s understandable that he would not want to subject himself to the possibility of having to deal with some aggressive responses or comments coming from some of his opponents,” he noted. “There’s really a lot to lose in doing that and so they may have calculated that there’s less to lose by not even showing up.”
Baraka said it was clearly “the predominant thinking within the Republican Party” that the nomination was Trump’s to refuse at this point, leaving little room for the other candidates to make a separate name for themselves at the Wednesday night debate. Indeed, the Iowa Poll, widely seen as the most reliable early poll for the primary race, found that Trump has by far the most solid support of any candidate: 68% said they won’t vote for anyone else.
“What the Democrats seem not to understand is - the perception is that these prosecutions are politicized,” he explained. “This is an attempt on the part of Democrats and Democratically-connected institutions and structures to undermine the ability of Donald Trump to run again.”
“I think that narrative is extending beyond the hardcore Trump supporters. People are raising questions around what appears to be a sort of piling-on, and indictments that have such a political character to them. We know they’re being framed as just some objective legal issues. And we know that the judge in Georgia, for example, claimed that she’s going to try this case without the politics. But very few people are in fact buying that. And it’s really a very dangerous situation because that perception is really helping to continue to undermine the legitimacy of US institutions.”
“It’s a very dangerous strategy, but one in which Democrats believe that, in some kind of way, they’re going to create a condition or situation where someone, one of the Republican candidates, will then break from the pack,” he said. “That seems to be the thinking of many of the Democratic Party strategists.”
Baraka said that the Democratic officials in Georgia had displayed a “political inclination to make” Trump’s prosecution “into a spectacle” by treating him as if he is a flight risk and imposing limitations on his speech.
“The main thing is: they want to degrade” Trump, he said. “They want those pictures, for example,” of Trump surrendering to authorities.
“They have this belief that this is going to somehow undermine Trump. I think it’s going to have the opposite effect,” Baraka asserted.
He accused them of having a kind of one-sided moral “blindness” that would inevitably lead to “political errors” on par with the second attempt to impeach Trump following the January 6, 2021, insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol.
“It’s all part of the process of the degeneration of politics in the US. It is incredibly dangerous because of the deepening economic crisis that we are facing. When you have the delegitimization of all of the US institutions then there’s no telling what may happen in terms of the politics here in this country. It’s very, very dangerous.”