# Trump to skip debate

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trump-to-skip-debate/744323>\
**Category:** Politics & Elections\
**Created:** [January 27, 2016, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trump-to-skip-debate/744323 "2016-01-27T00:36:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 40

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**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2016, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trump-to-skip-debate/744323/40 "2016-01-27T04:36:31Z")

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> [@DSeid](#):
>
> Decisions made by the unsure likely GOP voter in Iowa and NH will NOT based on policies or facts; they will be based on perceptions and gut reactions.

They are based on both.

> [@](#):
>
> And those looking to make a final decision in those two states will be over-represented among those who are tuning in, whether Trump is there or not. They will see other candidates performing in a room that does not have Trump sucking the oxygen out of it and will hear Trump mocked in a venue that he has run away from.

And they’ll be so bored at the murmurings of the usual pieties and mantras of fusionist conservatism-the paens to soulless Capital, the shrieking praise of unilateral right-Trotskyite foreign policy and the platitudes against abortion and for guns that they’ll tune it out in 15 minutes if they don’t watch something more interesting like BDSM porn.

> [@](#):
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> Most nationally will not watch (I might now because this is likely more entertaining than Trump’s usual tired out threadworn bombastistic schtick) but there is no question that some choice lines making fun of him will be played over and over again across the mediasphere the following several days, lines they have days to have writers create, lines better than these: “Citizens of Iowa, of New Hampshire, of this great country … this is is what Mr. Trump thinks of you. That you are so stupid that he could shoot someone and you’d vote for him. That you matter so little that he can run and hide from the last debate before voting.” … “Mr. Trump proves the old maxim true: bullies are cowards. The coward has run away. It’s time now for us grownups to decide how we will actually fight for our country even when we feel the battlegrounds are ‘not fair.’ They often _actually_ are not.”

That’s what they’ve said for the past half-year. Yet it is so self-evidently false that the humble American voter has not fallen prey to these libels. If anything the disgusting mutual masturbation sessions that a Trumpless GOP debate will inevitably be, with all the candidates desperately begging for the moneyshot from the cocks of the Kochs will cause revulsion in all patriotic souls and entrench the support behind the only Republican candidate who even remotely stands for the interests of the middle-class.

> [@](#):
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> Note that half of _his supporters_ who responded on his Twitter feed, likely his most solid supporters, told him TO participate.

Yes, people disagree on tactics, so what?

> [@](#):
>
> Yes he’ll respond afterwards. And have a few hours to think of them. Responses afterwards are almost always perceived as weak sauce. And his response will only highlight the lines used against him and give them more attention.

Yet Trump’s nuggets of wisdom have packed enough fight in every previous case to utterly annihilate and reduce to atoms the carefully amassed, pseudointellectual critiques of him.

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