Trump might not turn up to the next debate. But that doesn’t mean it should be cancelled

Donald Trump doesn’t want to answer voters’ questions. That’s the message being sent after the President, currently infected with Covid-19, told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo this morning that he would not appear at next week’s town hall-style debate. “I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate,” he said, at 8am the morning after Mike Pence and Kamala Harris went head-to-head. “They’re trying to protect Biden.”  Protecting people, including the Democratic nominee, from a potentially contagious person (like Trump) is common sense. Yet Trump knows he can’t possibly win a debate where he isn’t able to shout down the moderator or scream at his opponent. He has no substance, no command of nor respect for the facts, no deep understanding of public policy. He has only the tactics of a bully and a charlatan: scream, stomp, accuse, and ridicule.

That might work for him squaring off against a “fake news” journalist (his words) and a “radical left” Democrat (again, his words), but it won’t work when actual voters are asking him the questions. So, Trump has invented an excuse to bail on the whole debate. Rather than blinking, the Commission should call his bluff. The next debate should go on, with an empty chair representing an absent president.

In many ways, nothing symbolizes the Trump presidency better than an empty chair. This is a man who has refused time and again to show up for the American people. If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Trump golfed — at least 237 times since becoming president — while Americans died. His handling of the coronavirus pandemic, from falsely comparing it to the flu to refusing to wear masks, has demonstrated his utter disregard for the lives of the American people. Rather than working to pass another economic relief package to alleviate the financial burden so many of us are shouldering, he has stomped his feet and refused to work with Congress. Instead, he spends his days tweeting, as often as 50 times a day, and watching cable news reports on himself.

This is a vacuous, vainglorious man who pretends to be working by signing blank pieces of paper. Since he became president, Trump has told more than 20,000 lies, many of them in his first debate with Joe Biden. The nation watched in shame as Trump shouted over the former Vice President, interrupting him repeatedly and even arguing with the moderator, Chris Wallace. With Trump’s bloviations and bombast, yet utter lack of policy detail or platform (the Republican Party opted not to adopt one, running simply as “the Party of Trump”), no one walked away from that first debate any better informed.

The whole strategy backfired on the president. Trump received some of the worst reviews of his presidency — from the press, yes, but also from voters: only 24 percent of voters said Trump did a better job in last week’s debate, compared to 49 percent who thought Biden came out on top.

It is some of these voters who will ask the questions in the next debate, and they deserve to have their questions answered. A virtual debate makes sense to anyone who takes this virus seriously, and it is hardly unprecedented. Not only have millions of Americans found themselves conducting business meetings and interviews via Zoom and Skype since the start of this pandemic, but even a presidential debate has been done remotely. Way back in 1960, the year of the first televised debates, John F Kennedy was in New York when he squared off against Richard Nixon in Los Angeles in a debate moderated by Bill Shadel in Chicago.

There is no compelling reason why Trump should refuse to attend the next debate except that he is a coward with a sociopathic disregard for human life. This is a man who has ignored public health officials and put his own voters at risk by holding several indoor rallies in the middle of a pandemic, including one in Tulsa which contributed to an uptick in coronavirus cases and likely killed Herman Cain. Not two weeks ago, it seems he hosted a super-spreader event at the White House where he himself was infected. He forced Secret Service agents to take him on a joyride in a hermetically sealed car, exposing them to his virus and putting their lives at risk, as he did with other White House staffers by insisting on working from the Oval Office rather than quarantining in the East Wing.

To allow this reckless behavior to derail a presidential debate would be a disservice to the American people, and the Commission on Presidential Debates is right to move to a virtual format. Trump might not show up, but that doesn’t mean they should cancel the debate. The American people deserve to hear from the men who wish to lead us. If only one of them shows up, let the other’s absence speak for itself.

Put on a split screen, complete with an empty chair where the president ought to be. Let it represent everything Trump represents: a dereliction of duty, a lack of leadership, and the more than 210,000 Americans who won’t be sitting around their families’ Thanksgiving table because Donald Trump would rather sneer and snarl about how unfair the media is to him rather than do the job he is asking us to keep.