Moderators Martha MacCallum & Bret Baier Talk About Fox News Republican Debate: Donald Trump Will Loom Large Even If He’s Not There
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Donald Trump has yet to announce definitively whether he will participate in the first Republican debate next week, something that likely would make the difference between blockbuster ratings for Fox News if he does and very different dynamics if he does not.
So far, all indications are that the former president will not participate, the most recent being his Truth Social post on Thursday morning, as he complained that Fox & Friends was purposely showing an unflattering picture big “orange” picture of him. “And then they want me to debate!” he wrote.
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The network and its two debate moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, are preparing for both scenarios, but whether Trump is there or not, his four criminal indictments are likely to be a topic.
“How the other candidates react to it will be interesting,” Baier, the network’s chief political anchor and anchor and executive editor of Special Report, told Deadline in an interview this week. “In the GOP primary, we have seen these indictments increase his polling numbers, increase his fundraising. … How others react to it and how differently they approach it will be a part of this primary and this debate.”
MacCallum, anchor and executive editor of The Story, said that the indictments — including new racketeering charges in Georgia — are “also a good reason for the former president to come and make his own mark on where he stands on it.”
She said that “maybe because of everything that is going on, it would make sense to be there and to rebut some of what is going to be said in real time.”
Trump’s presence also would mark the first time that he has faced off against the 2024 GOP field, with the expectation that seven or eight will qualify for the Milwaukee stage by Wednesday. That includes Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who up until recently has been his most serious rival, and Chris Christie, who has staked much of his campaign on calling out Trump.
The fireworks of such a moment would draw comparisons to 2015, when the Fox News’ first GOP debate of that cycle drew a record 24 million viewers for Fox News, undoubtedly because of the novelty of seeing the brash and bombastic Trump face off for the first time with the expansive Republican field. Media consultant Brad Adgate predicts that the debate will draw about 5 million if Trump is not there and perhaps up to 15 million if he is. That accounts for some Trump fatigue and overall cable audience erosion, but “this time around, because of his legal situation, that may increase the curiosity factor,” he said.
There also have been reports that if Trump does not attend, he might do some counterprogramming, perhaps with an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who now has a Twitter/X series.
Asked about the possibility of Trump doing some thunder-stealing stunt, Baier said: “It would be in the former president’s style, but we’re not focused on where he won’t be. We’re focused on if he’ll be on that stage, so he’ll do what he does.”
On air and behind the scenes, the network has made the case for Trump to participate. The New York Times reported that earlier this month, on the day that he was informed that he was being indicted for a third time, Trump dined with Fox News’ Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace at his Bedminster resort, and they lobbied him to attend.
Baier said that when he met Trump for his sit-down interview with him in June, he also brought up his participation in the debate. “I wasn’t in lobbying mode. I was just having a conversation,” Baier said.
“We’ll be prepared either way,” he added. “Obviously it changes the dynamics a little bit as far as, not the type of questions or the subjects, but the order and the kind of effort that candidates talk to one another onstage.”
The two-hour debate, to be held at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, the site of next year’s GOP convention, will not include any candidate opening statements but will feature an audience. While Baier indicated that they would instruct those in the crowd to keep their applause or cheers to a minimum, he said that “you can’t really silence a whole stadium full of people.” Candidates will have one minute to answer a question and 30 minutes for follow-ups.
A Trump-less debate would be far from irrelevant. Despite Trump’s wide lead over his rivals, both moderators say they have detected a willingness among GOP voters to consider alternatives. MacCallum points out that past debates have produced breakout moments that make “people sit up and take notice.”
“When I get out and talk to voters, I hear from so many of them that they are very open-minded at this point,” she said. “They have a gut feeling about which way they are leaning, but they are [saying], ‘I want to hear from candidates.’
“We see in the polling that there is a pretty strong appetite for someone other than Trump and [Joe] Biden,” she added. “So there is opportunity out there for these candidates. If there wasn’t, they wouldn’t be there.”
Baier noted that even though Trump holds wide leads in the polls, “there’s 50-to-60% of the GOP voters who have either not decided or are not with him. That’s one of the interesting things. If he is not on the stage, there is this battle to be the alternative to the former president, so that you come down to the end, and it’s this or that. And I think GOP voters want that choice to be able to have the best candidate to go forward.”
The network has been in this situation before. In 2016, Trump teased whether he would participate in the Fox News-sponsored debate just before the Iowa caucuses, as the network refused his demand to remove one of its co-moderators, Megyn Kelly. He ended up holding a rival event.
Seven years later, he has done much the same thing. Trump has complained of Baier as co-moderator and has said that his line of questioning during the June interview was “nasty.” Yet according to Baier, Trump told him immediately after their interview that he was “tough but fair.”
The Trump attacks, on Twitter and then Truth Social, are “how he’s operated for a long time,” Baier said. “And it’s something that you just deal with, and the interesting part about it is, it’s very cordial when I see him in person, and that interview was good conversation before and afterwards. He’s a unique figure in politics, and it’d be great if he was onstage, but if he isn’t, I think it will be really illuminating for voters anyway.”
In his interview with Trump, Baier bluntly told him, “You lost the 2020 election.” The former president, though, continues to make the unfounded claims that the election was stolen from him.
It’s a subject likely to come up if he does participate, and one that has engulfed the network in litigation.
In its defamation lawsuit against Fox, Dominion Voting Systems alleged that network personalities and guests amplified false statements that the voting systems company was involved in rigging the election results. Just as a trial was about to begin in April, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle. A lawsuit against Fox News by another election systems company, Smartmatic, is pending.
Baier was on the witness list to testify in the Dominion case. In the trove of emails and other documents unsealed in the case, he was shown to have stated privately, two days after the election, that there was “no evidence” of fraud, while he did segments on his newscast debunking claims. In an email to Fox executives, he also addressed the backlash to the fact that Fox News was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden. “It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg. And we put it back in his column. The better we are. In my opinion.” The call proved to be correct, but it set off the Trump White House, and it was the first indication that he would lose the race.
Baier said that the reports of the email, first revealed by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their 2022 book The Divider, were “taken out of context.”
“Being where every other network was, we were out on a limb by ourselves on that call on Arizona,” he said. “I have been through that time and time again on how it was misconstrued and the way a mistyped email; nobody on that email chain really perceived it the way it was written up in the press. But my concern always was about getting it right — not only getting it first, but getting it right. And there was a chance it would go the other way.”
Is he concerned over a Trump-fueled backlash at this debate, perhaps over a question that gets asked or something else that happens?
“So you don’t think about perception, about even if people are perceiving a moderator one way or another,” Baier said. “I think the chips will fall where they fall after the debate. And if you look at our debate track record, we have been characterized as being the toughest, the fairest, every time we have done it previously, so hopefully we will live up to that standard this time.”
He added that “the Dominion settlement is never in my mind. It really isn’t. It’s so distant a memory that it doesn’t factor into my day-to-day.” MacCallum said it was “ancient history” and added, “I think it’s been pretty well established that that call was made at an appropriate time and through a process that existed for all of the calls that were made.”
Baier said that asking questions as a moderator can be a matter of tone, “not attacking but respectfully interacting in a civil way.”
“[Trump] chooses to do his attacks the way he does,” he said. “We choose to do our side — we have a news side and opinion side. The news side is going to do stories that he doesn’t like, but it’s the news. So you take it with a grain of salt, and you keep moving and if you build it, they will come. I think they will come.”
MacCallum said: “Everybody has the right to say, ‘I don’t think that’s a fair question’ — anything along those lines. So as long as the criticism or the attack … is fair, I don’t have any problem with that. When it steps beyond that, then I think that is not a positive for anything about the process or the debate. So I have no problem about the work that we do. I feel very strongly about our reputation.”
She added: “I have always has a great amount of confidence in our team. That has never wavered. I had confidence in our team in 2020, and I have it in our team today. This is not something that I lose too much sleep over.”
Regardless of who is there and who is not, Baier said he and MacCallum will try to get the candidates to interact more with one another, “so that you can see the contrast and voters can see the differences.”
That includes issues like abortion, as Republicans have grappled with electoral losses even in red states following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. MacCallum also said an issue like climate change “is something that is top of mind for Democrats and Republicans. They may have different viewpoints about the kind of answer that they’re looking for on it, and absolutely, I think that would be in the mix.”
Another potential topic: the Hunter Biden investigation. “I think that what a lot of viewers and voters are interested in is whether the Department of Justice and the FBI are even-handed in their treatment of all of these cases,” she said.
As for fact-checking, MacCallum said that they have been doing research on where the candidates stand and what they have said and done in the past, “so that if they say something that doesn’t hold water, doesn’t match up with the facts on the ground, we will be ready to step in and follow-up and ask them to be held accountable for what they are saying up there.”
MacCallum said that she could “absolutely foresee” a moment where 2020 election claims come up during the debate.
“However, this isn’t a one-on-one interview,” she said. “And I think as a moderator, our responsibility is to moderate, to make sure that everyone has opportunities to answer questions, to make sure our questions are as strong and pointed and evoke conversation and debate between the candidates. … So I think that if and when that topic comes up, I think you’re going to hear a pretty lively debate right onstage.”
Baier said: “The moderators are there to steer, to question, but not be the focus. If we can get out, and someone has moments in the debate and there’s exchanges with the candidates to deal substantively with the big issues that Americans care about, and it’s not about the moderators, that’s a successful debate.”
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