Former president Donald Trump says he is still deciding whether he plans to participate in the upcoming GOP presidential debates, but questioned why he would allow the other candidates to “take shots” at him when he is so far ahead in the polls.
“I like to debate,” Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier in an interview that aired Tuesday evening. “I don’t mind it at all, but when you’re 40 points up … why would I let ‘Ada’ Hutchinson—” Trump said, before going off on a tangent to explain why he calls former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson “Ada.” His explanation was that he is “weak” and “ineffective.”
“Why would I let these people take shots at me?” Trump said of Hutchinson and Chris Christie, who he said has “nothing going” for him and is “a slob.”
Trump currently leads the field with 51.9 percent support, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is in second with 21.1 percent, followed by former Vice President Mike Pence at 5.8 percent, Nikki Haley at 3.8 percent, Senator Tim Scott at 3.6 percent, Christie at 2.3 percent, and Vivek Ramaswamy at 2.3 percent. Hutchinson, Larry Elder and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum are polling at less than 1 percent each.
But he said that while he hasn’t made a “definitive decision” on whether to participate in the primary debates, he also questioned why he would participate in a debate that is hosted by a “hostile” network like Fox, which is hosting the first debate in August.
Baier responded that Trump gets a “fair shake” on the network. Trump responded that his interview with Baier had been a “tough interview” and not a “puff piece.”
Trump said however that he and President Biden “have to definitely debate.”
He continued to take shots at the other Republican contenders throughout the interview.
“Christie is like at one percent or less, Nikki Haley is at 2 percent. She hasn’t caught on because everyone knows she’s highly overrated,” he said. He claimed he appointed Haley to serve as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. only because he wanted South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Henry McMaster to become governor of South Carolina in Haley’s absence.
Trump also spent significant time throughout the interview blasting DeSantis, whom he said he has nicknamed “DeSanctimonious” because he is “very disloyal.”
“I helped him 100 percent he was dead politically and for him to then say ‘I’m going to run against the guy who got me into office'” was disloyal, Trump said.
Trump said he is attacking DeSantis because he is number two in the polls right now, but predicted he “could be dropping like a rock” to third or fourth soon, at which point he would stop focusing on him because “I like fighting number two.”
He also hit DeSantis over his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming that other governors handled the pandemic better and kept their states open and that DeSantis only has “better PR than other governors.”
He suggested DeSantis “loved” Dr. Anthony Fauci and defended his own decision to listen to Fauci at the time by saying, “You’re not actually allowed to fire him — but I wouldn’t usually let that get in my way.”
However, DeSantis waited longer than many other states to even declare a stay-at-home order, which he officially issued on April 1, 2020. By contrast, California, the first state to issue a stay-at-home order, did so on March 19. Only a handful of states, with more rural populations, never issued such an order, including Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
By April 20, DeSantis had already appointed a “Re-Open Florida Task Force,” which he tasked with quickly forming a plan to reopen the state. The stay-at-home order expired in early May, and by late September, DeSantis had lifted all restrictions on restaurants and businesses.
Trump, meanwhile, was questioning Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen certain facilities in the Peach State on April 22.
The former president defended his own leadership during Covid-19 and suggested the disease spread from China because of “incompetence” in the Chinese government.