The Republican Party’s Debate Rules Make It Impossible for Trump to Lose

Appearing in the Republican presidential primary debates is no small feat. After skipping the events in the 2020 cycle to give then-President Donald Trump a default coronation, the GOP has erected around the 2024 debate stage the big, beautiful wall it can’t quite build on the southern border.

Some of the party’s requirements clearly function to establish viability. For instance, candidates must register support of at least 1 percent in select national and early primary state polls, and they must count at least 40,000 unique campaign donors in at least 20 U.S. states and territories.

But other rules are less about interest among the voting public and more about partisan discipline: Candidates will be barred from the stage unless they sign two pledges, one to support whomever the GOP eventually nominates for president, and the other to refuse to participate in any general election debate organized by the Commission for Presidential Debates (a bipartisan organization, cofounded by the Republican Party itself, which has overseen such debates since 1987 and already gives the GOP more control over the debates than it had in earlier decades).

Read more at The Daily Beast.