Republicans Are Rigging Debate Rules To Help Trump

The RNC has changed the debate rules for their candidates, and all of the standards in place now seem to be there only to boost Donald Trump. In addition to forcing all candidates to sign a loyalty pledge, the Party is now requiring all candidates to sign a pledge that they will NOT participate in any general election debates hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Additionally, they are avoiding all major networks and instead going exclusively to low-viewership conservative outlets, starving second-tier candidates of an audience. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Well, it certainly seems like the Republican National Committee is doing everything that they possibly can to make sure that their debate schedule is rigged in favor of Donald Trump, who might not even participate in these debates. But here's what's happening. So far, we've talked about the fact that the party is forcing anyone who wants to participate in the debates to sign a loyalty pledge, saying that they will, of course, support the eventual Republican nominee, even if it is not themselves. But it's now being reported that there is a second pledge that these candidates have to sign that is going to severely handicap them if they do become the eventual nominee. And that, of course, is a pledge to boycott any general election debates against President Biden hosted by the Nonpartisan Commission for Presidential Debates. The group that has put on the presidential debates since 1987, the Republican Party is telling their candidates that you, if you wanna participate in our primary debates, cannot agree to do any presidential debates if that group that puts them on, puts them on.

So that is probably one of the stupidest things I've ever heard the Republican party do, and we're talking about the party of stupid. So that says a lot, but you are in intentionally handicapping your own candidates by forcing them to say that we will not do presidential debates if we become the nominee. Real smart thinking there on behalf of the R N C. But it gets even worse than that. What's happening right now is you've got two Republican candidates that are effectively household names Donald Trump, who is leading the pack by double digits at this point, and Ron DeSantis now a couple of the other folks, yeah, people know of them. They don't know what they stand for. People like Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, but the rest of 'em, I've honestly forgotten some of the people who are running for president under the Republican banner, and I do this every day.

But those people are not going to get the airtime that they desperately want because the Republican National Committee is also not going to air their debates on any of the major networks in. Instead, they're going to exclusively be choosing conservative outlets. Fox News gets the first one. NEWSMAX is likely gonna do one, possibly one America, possibly real America's voice. So what happens is that you have Republican candidates speaking exclusively to a hard right Republican audience, and based on Fox News' declining ratings, even though they're still at the top of the Republican Pact, you're talking about putting your people in front of only a handful, maybe a million or 2 million voters.

What that does is it prevents any of the lesser known, uh, candidates from getting out there, from getting known, from having a statement that goes viral on social media for good reasons, not bad reasons, obviously, but you're intentionally making it to where these people cannot get their faces in front of the audience to win a primary, which is of course, effectively rigging the whole thing in favor of either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, because those are the two names that people know. So when they show up and they finally start voting in that primary early next year, they're gonna say, well, I know Trump. I know DeSantis. I have never heard of these other people, so obviously I'm not gonna vote for them. And this is all by design.