The prevailing absurdity of a debate between a bunch of Republicans about whether Donald Trump should be their party's nominee in 2020 was shattered by a single moment from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. It was not anything Stephens said, but what was said to him. He played a recording of a death threat he received at his office at the Times, a reminder that while Donald Trump is not necessarily of a different kind, he is of a different degree. Here's what the caller said.

Hey, Bret, what do you think? You think the pen is mightier than the sword or that the AR is mightier than the pen? I don't carry an AR, but once we start shooting you fuckers, you're not going to pop up like you do now. You're worthless. The press is the enemy of the United States people.

The recording detonated in the room like a flashbang, as the few hundred who had paid to watch this outbreak of Civil Discourse were brought crashing down to earth. The president is no carnival act—or, as one of his defenders would later put it here, a source of "entertainment," an ode to the reality show presidency's decline into vacuous infotainment. He is dangerous. People's lives are on the line. This is no debate-club fodder, but you couldn't always tell from the proceedings here.

"After the Billy Bush tape, my friends asked how I could still support Trump," Liz Peek, a conservative columnist and Fox News contributor, told the audience in her closing statement. "My answer? Education reform." The auditorium erupted in laughter, as the final absurd capstone was placed on the evening. Arguing in favor of the president, an adult human was suggesting she'd voted for the "grab 'em by the pussy" guy because he was a Charter School Buff.



Peek stumps for Donald Trump, American president. Getty Images

Every debater's duty, moderator John Donvan explained at the start, was "to bring facts and logic" to the proceedings. This was an event hosted by Intelligence Squared U.S., after all, a nonprofit dedicated to "raising the level of debate" in our society. It was a noble aim for all assembled here on Manhattan's Upper East Side on Thursday evening, as was Donvan's request that the audience refrain from "booing and hissing." But they had convened four Republicans to discuss whether Donald Trump should be the Republican nominee with the expressed certainty that he would be the nominee.

The decadent absurdity was bubbling at the surface as former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and Bret Stephens argued Trump should not be renominated, while Peek and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach argued he should. At the exact same time they engaged in such Civil Discourse, the same Donald Trump was behind a rally podium out in Michigan, calling the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee "a pencil neck" as the crowd hooted and hollered. This debate was a time capsule from 2015, an implausible throwback to the bygone days of building Elite Consensus, before the world's most powerful man was ranting to sold-out arenas full of people in "Q" gear that the Great Lakes have "record deepness."

Flake delivers his opening statement from the lectern. Samuel Lahoz

There's also, after all, the basic absurdity of the question itself. Donvan and Robert Rosencrantz, the chairman of the board of trustees for this nonprofit, took pains to point out beforehand that the "should" in the debate question had both practical and moral dimensions. But on either, the question is settled.

Of course Donald Trump should not be nominated, by any political party, to be President of the United States. He has waged war on the institutions of democracy, like an independent justice system and the free press. He has assaulted the Constitution's separation of powers with a phony national emergency. He has repeatedly embraced political violence. He has overseen an administration rife with systemic corruption. He has demonstrated complete ignorance of world affairs and domestic policy issues, as well as cognitive deficiency and emotional instability. He spends four-to-eight hours a day watching television. He made 15 false claims in public every day last year. Would you nominate him to babysit your kids?

Trump shrugs in the midst of doing Very Presidential Things in Michigan Thursday night. Scott Olson Getty Images

Still, the show must go on. The basic divide of NeverTrumpers vs. Trumpists here was really a distinction between polite corporate conservatism and the reactionaries. Flake and Stephens devoted plenty of time to distinguishing themselves on the basis of principle, but it's not clear how much actual policy they disagree with the Trump administration on. Flake voted with Trump 81 percent of the time as a senator, and both sides here absolutely loved Trump's core conservative achievements: a tax bill passed in the middle of the night that overwhelmingly benefits corporations and the wealthy; stuffing the judicial branch full of judges specifically because they will promote conservative ideology (regardless of, say, the law); and the manic deregulation frenzy embarked on by the various departments of his Executive Branch.

In fairness, there was certainly a disconnect on immigration. Stephens kicked things off by saying "good evening" to the audience and "Buenos noches, Kris"—a tag on Kobach that got plenty of laughs. The former Kansas official is a true Trumpist reactionary, having devoted his career to suppressing inconvenient voters and cracking down on undocumented immigrants. He wrote the "papers, please" law in Arizona and has traveled the country crafting voting policies that disproportionately impact people of color and young voters. A true team player! That doesn't mean he's all that good at this: while defending an unbelievably restrictive voting law in Kansas, Kobach did such a bad job lawyering that Judge Julie Robinson sentenced him to remedial law school. He also led Trump's "voter fraud" commission, which was eventually shut down when it was exposed as a petty scam. Oh, he also accepted money from white nationalists while running for governor of Kansas.

Kobach makes a point, probably about immigrant criminality. Samuel Lahoz

At various points, Kobach engaged in scaremongering about immigrant crime and suggested undocumented immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion a year. Flake rejected the crime talk with the well-documented fact that illegal immigrants do not commit crime at higher rates than native-born citizens. Kobach responded with data pulled from "CIS"—the Center for Immigration Studies—which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group. Meanwhile, a big part of Flake-and-Stephens' shtick was harking back to Saint Ronald Reagan, who welcomed immigrants and once gave a speech in front of the Statue of Liberty.

That's all well and good, but Reagan also cooked up the stew of tax schemes and deregulatory mayhem and changes to corporate governance that have, over decades now, shoveled the huge amount of wealth generated by the American economy towards a tiny slice of the population. (In fairness, corporate Democrats have been complicit in some of this.) While the economy is booming, inequality continues to skyrocket, and American life expectancy has dropped for three years straight. None of these issues made the table here, because no one in the Republican Party thinks they are problems—or at least, problems worth fixing at the expense of the wealthy donors who make the wheels go 'round. "Our arguments will only make sense to Republicans," Peek said of her side at the beginning. But really, that applied to both camps.

Debate Team—assemble! The debaters from left to right: Jeff Flake, Bret Stephens, moderator John Donvan, Liz Peek, and Kris Kobach. Samuel Lahoz

After all, Kobach is the living embodiment of the abject failure of conservative ideology in practice—the kind of ideology that predates Trump, is more closely associated with Reagan, and which both Flake and Stephens buy into with religious fervor. In Kansas, Kobach's ally Sam Brownback oversaw proceedings as the state was turned into, as my colleague Charles P. Pierce calls it, a conservative lab rat.

The state government slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations, guaranteeing that it would attract business and generate economic growth so massive the tax cuts would pay for themselves. The result, though, was that the state budget went into freefall, and rather than backtrack on the cuts, Brownback slashed funding to education and other public services while proposing a tax hike on booze. It didn't make up the difference, but it did destroy the commonwealth to the extent that Kansas—yes, Kansas—elected Kris Kobach's Democratic opponent in 2018.

Flake and Stephens ponder the moment. Samuel Lahoz

Stephens mentioned Kobach's failure as indicative of Trump's inevitable demise—though everybody granted that Trump could easily be re-elected. But he and Flake saw it as a failure specific to Trumpists, who champion Walls over Reaganesque appeals to "freedom and opportunity." They did not identify that conservative economic ideology had destroyed Kobach's state. "Deregulation, lower taxes—things that make us all more prosperous," Flake said at one point, spelling out the First Gospel of Reagan.

The actual affirmative argument for another four years of Donald Trump, American president, was in short supply. Kobach and Peek referenced the strong economy and labor market, and the fact that wages are finally ticking up. They spoke to the fact that Trump has a strangehold on the party, and that no candidate could reasonably replace him on the ballot. But there was no moral case to be made, and Peek spent much of her time scaremongering about The European Socialist Nightmare in a preview of the 2020 cycle.

"Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders don't believe in the American Dream," she said. "They think billionaires and corporations ruined it." This was dismissed as laughable, as if corporate power and inequality have not fundamentally reshaped our society since the 1980s. Meanwhile, here's Donald Trump kicking off his presidential campaign in 2015.

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The main divide throughout, though, seemed to be a question of aesthetics—which is, of course, the defining feature of an authoritarian movement like Trump's. The bullying and cruelty and crude demagoguery on show at the simultaneous Trump rally was a national problem, the NeverTrumpers repeatedly suggested. Bludgeoning the various Enemies cannot be the staple rhetorical flourish of an American president. They're not wrong, but they also pointed more substantively to the decay of American leadership in the world.

American leftists might only see the death and destruction wrought by American Empire, but Flake did bring some receipts when it came to his talk of Reagan's Shining City on a Hill. Vaclav Havel really did, as Flake pointed out, give a speech before Congress in 1990 suggesting the beacon of the United States lit the way for those trying to escape from behind the Iron Curtain.

"What are political prisoners still in Russia thinking?" Flake asked at one point. "Who do they look to? They've seen our president stand with their leader, Vladimir Putin, and take his word over the word of our intelligence agencies.

"What do political prisoners in prison camps and labor camps in North Korea think when they hear our president refer to their president as a 'great leader'—a great leader for his people?"

Trump and Kim shake hands in Hanoi. Handout Getty Images

This was the most tangible substantive divide in the end—even more than immigration. Because this is the way that NeverTrump conservatives have most convinced themselves that Donald Trump is an aberration in conservative politics, rather than, as with Kansas, a symptom of the ideological disease reaching its terminal stages. He's no Reagan—he hates NATO!

Never mind that, while Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax because it's cold outside, Reagan once claimed trees cause more pollution than automobiles. And never mind that Reagan launched his campaign with a speech backing "states' rights" outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during the Freedom Summer of 1964. The Republican Party was tapping into the dark undercurrents of America, and harnessing the fantastical thinking of reactionary anti-intellectualism, for a very long time before Donald Trump came along.

Earlier, Flake wondered aloud, "would George W. Bush have recognized a Republican president who calls our free press the Enemy of the People, or forcibly separates children from their parents at the border?" Certainly Bush would never have used that language, and acknowledged publicly the role of the press as an institution of democracy. But his administration did feed misinformation to the press to manufacture support for a war that ultimately killed over 1 million people—and separated a few children from their parents in the process.

Stephens wondered whether the Republican Party would be "the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, and Jeff Flake" going forward. It's certainly not the party of Lincoln, or of Roosevelt, who championed environmentalism and led the effort to dismantle the monopoly power. It is, in a way, the party of John McCain, who once acknowledged climate change and called for a carbon tax, but later folded to the extremist elements in his party as they took over wholesale in the Tea Party backlash to the first black presidency.

If the Reasonable Republicans want to return the party to Teddy Roosevelt, that's one thing. It will require a return to the basic mental process of evidence-based thinking and critical reasoning, not to mention abandoning the politics of white backlash. If they want to return to the days of Ronald Reagan, we are in real trouble—mostly because it won't look much different.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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