On a cool August night on the crowded patio of his private club in New Jersey, former President Donald Trump held up his phone to his dinner companions.
The Republican front-runner was having dinner with a Fox News contributor and columnist, Charlie Hurt, when a call came in from another member of the Fox team. The man on the other end of the line, Trump was delighted to show his guests, was Bret Baier, one of the two moderators of the first Republican debate Wednesday, according to two people with knowledge of the call.
It was Trump’s second Fox dinner that week. The night before, he had hosted the Fox News president, Jay Wallace, and the network’s CEO, Suzanne Scott, who had gone to Bedminster, New Jersey, hoping to persuade Trump to attend the debate. Baier was calling to get a feel for the former president’s latest thinking.
For months, Fox had been working Trump privately and publicly. He was keeping them guessing, in his patented petulant way. But even as he behaved as if he was listening to entreaties, Trump was proceeding with a plan for his own counterprogramming to the debate.
The former president has told aides that he has made up his mind not to participate in the debate and has decided to post an online interview with Tucker Carlson that night instead. The interview with Carlson has already been taped, according to a person with direct knowledge of the event.
Upstaging Fox’s biggest event of the year would be provocation enough. But an interview with Carlson — who was Fox’s top-rated prime-time host and is at war with the network, which is still paying out his contract — amounts to a slap in the network’s face by Trump. The decision is a potential source of aggravation for the Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, who privately urged him to attend, including during her own visit to Bedminster last month.
But Trump’s primary motive in skipping the debate is not personal animosity toward McDaniel but a crass…
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