Donald Trump is definitely (probably) skipping Thursday’s Republican Party Debate, the last before the Iowa caucus. We could attempt to understand why he’s doing this by going off what he’s said, but the results are as apt to be bounded by reality as the reasons why a kid “playing spies” is creeping around the house making pew-pew noises and calling you “Capitalist Laser Dog”. You apply literalism at your own peril.

Ostensibly, Trump decided to boycott the debate and consider hosting a counterprogramming event, like a Wounded Warrior Project fundraiser, because he objects to the bias of Fox News anchor and debate moderator Megyn Kelly. You may remember Kelly for her rightfully challenging Trump on the ample number of odious things he’s said about women – not to mention Trump later explaining her conduct as having sprung from “blood coming out of her wherever”.

That could be the reason. When Kelly gets riled up about something, she tends to go after it hard. Just take the case of the non-white Santa Claus, or the totally real existential threat to democracy posed by the New Black Panther party. She’s relentless. Trump might have reasonably concluded that Kelly could embarrass him and cost him key points in Iowa.

But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a man who has proved that political physics are as explicable as gravity in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. Countless times the man has charged off the cliff face and walked blissfully unharmed across the open air of a gorge because he’s decided that he can walk on air and refuses to look down. Almost every explanation for his behavior is the acme of pundit divination, hoping the predictions they just fired off don’t blow back on them.

Trump may have calculated that he could flex and make Fox back down and replace Kelly. The last time he directly threatened them about her, the network mostly went silent as she reportedly received hate mail from Trump supporters.

Or he could have, in his canny showman way, realized that he could make the entire pre-Iowa debate about him without having to risk giving any awkward answers on troublesome topics. He’d give every candidate in the room an excuse to attack him, positioning them as haters and losers who can only take potshots at the big guy when he’s out of the room, while positioning himself as the people’s candidate instead of another do-nothing party hack.

Meanwhile, he could make Wednesday, Thursday and Friday’s news cycles about him. What no one can tell you for certain is whether this will hurt him. The first time he faced Megyn Kelly, he responded to fair questions about misogyny by implying she was menstruating. He insulted Beltway darling John McCain and suffered no consequences. He called II Corinthians “Two Corinthians” and was endorsed by Jerry Falwell’s son.

You can already see critics’ murmurs of arguments like, “If Trump can’t face Megyn Kelly, how can he face Putin or Isis?” It’s a stupid question, because the Republican party has already decided that the Republican candidates should not be challenged, and Donald Trump doubly so.

The Republican party just disinvited the National Review from an upcoming debate so Trump wouldn’t have to face them, chucking its own dogma organ of the last half century because it released an issue critical of Trump. The party also dumped NBC from upcoming debates because it thought questions from the plutocrat-fondlers at CNBC were too difficult.

And what, really, can Fox News do to retaliate for Trump’s announced departure? The trouble with Fox spending two decades telling conservatives that all media criticisms of conservative leaders are lies is that Fox News is still the media. Eventually your tactics come back to hit you.

They’re also in a double bind of having spent two decades marginalizing women who cry misogyny as shrill, hysterical harpies. And they’re in the triple bind of having stared down Trump before, started to turn their guns on him, then put them aside after a truce was drawn, revealing the conflict to be personal, not based on actual policies. How could it be any less, when the network has feted The Donald for years, even encouraged him to run for president?



Any future action runs against 20 years of audience programming and risks re-litigating a previous conflict that only draws attention to the fact that they will be attacking a conservative with the same kind of self-interested animosity the rest of the lying media supposedly bears.

Tuesday night’s tantrum could have cost Trump Iowa, or it could have just cleanly delivered it. He could win with 40% of the vote. Or his supporters could have been illusory – well-wishers who never planned to caucus, who will melt back into the fields like some counterinsurgent force that never felt like bothering with the shooting part of the war. Right now all of these can be true, like Schrodinger’s Cat, but with a matted combover in the box instead.

If this election is really as unpredictable as everyone has claimed it is for months now, let’s stop predicting it. The pundits won’t be able to help themselves, prognosticating against the tide, like Canute, if Canute cashed six-figure checks for roundtable analysis. But for the rest of us, let’s really surprise them. Let’s take pundits at their word, call this whole thing either an ugly or a joyous mess, and meet back Monday night.