In Defense of The Donald

A lot of fair-minded Republicans and conservatives are saying that the GOP candidates should avoid the presidential debate moderated by Donald Trump.

They say that Trump is a reality television star, and they say that he is an unserious political figure. As Ron Paul stated in declining the invitation to participate in the Trump-moderated debate, “The selection of a reality television personality to host a presidential debate that voters nationwide will be watching is beneath the office of the Presidency and flies in the face of that office’s history and dignity.”

Fine. Perhaps Paul is correct. But perhaps everyone should lighten up. After all, are we really to believe that Trump is any worse than the slew of moderators who have hosted the debates so far in this election cycle?

Trump might be full of himself, but is he any worse than CBS’s Scott Pelley? “Scott Pelley was a terrible moderator,” Marc Thiessen wrote at the conclusion of the CBS hosted debate last month. “He treated the men who might be the next commander in chief like schoolchildren, cutting them off in mid-sentence, lecturing them to answer his questions.”

And what about CNN’s Anderson Cooper? Sure Trump is smarmy, but it would be a tight competition for who is smarmier between the two of them. Cooper helped make famous the derogative (and dirty) term “tea bagger” as a way of making of Tea Party conservatives.
 
Yet that never propelled fair-minded conservatives from saying that the Republican candidates should skip a debate hosted by Anderson Cooper.
 
The truth is, the Republican candidates should skip any debate they don’t want to participate in. Surely there are pluses and minuses to each—and some may be beneficial to one and not another.

But there seems to be little need to create such uproar over one debate moderated by one Donald Trump. Besides, Trump is actually an experienced businessman. Surely his questions will be far more interesting than those of many others.