Republican candidates led by Ron DeSantis attacked Donald Trump for skipping the second Republican presidential debate, as they scrapped to stand out in a crowded field that remains dominated by the former president.
The taunts from Republican rivals came shortly after Trump spoke in Michigan to rally support for a new term in the White House from blue- collar workers in the rustbelt, amid a strike roiling the car sector.
“Donald Trump is missing in action — he should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record where they added $7.8tn to the debt that set the stage for the inflation that we have,” said the Florida governor at the debate on Wednesday night, which was held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, later jumped in to bash Trump for being “afraid” of being on stage.
“You’re ducking these things . . . You keep doing that, nobody up here’s going to keep calling you Donald Trump, we’re going to call you Donald Duck.”
The debate began with the 2024 rivals blaming Joe Biden’s handling of the economy for the auto strike and criticising the US president for taking the historic step of joining a picket line of union workers this week.
“Biden showed up on that picket line, but why are those workers actually there? It’s because of all the spending that he has pushed through in the economy that has raised the inflation,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said.
“He doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on an unemployment line,” said Mike Pence, the former vice-president. “Bidenomics has failed . . . Joe Biden’s Green New Deal agenda is good for Beijing and bad for Detroit.”
But speaking in Michigan, Trump begged for the endorsement of Shawn Fain, the United Automobile Workers president.
“Get your union leaders to endorse me, and I’ll take care of the rest,” Trump told the rally.
Fain has withheld an endorsement for Biden, saying it must be “earned”. But he has been openly critical of Trump, declining to meet the former president this week in Michigan and telling CNN there was a “pathetic irony that the former president is going to hold a rally for union members at a non-union business”.
Trump has now skipped two Republican presidential primary debates, as he tries to position himself as the presumed GOP candidate, targeting his attacks on Biden rather than his fellow Republicans.
During the debate, some of the candidates also tried to attack each other. Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, took on Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor, while Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN, criticised DeSantis for his scepticism of more aid for Ukraine. “This is not a territorial dispute,” she said.
The Reagan library is a symbolic venue for the party, even though traditional Reagan-era conservatism has made way for Trump-inspired populism and isolationism in recent years.
Since the first Republican debate on August 23, Trump’s lead in national polling over DeSantis has expanded further, with 54 per cent of the party’s primary voters backing the former president, while 13.8 per cent support the Florida governor, according to the 538.com average.
Haley has since moved into third place with support from 6.3 per cent of voters, matching Ramaswamy.
