Former President Donald Trump has agreed to sit for a town hall with Fox News that will air opposite the Republican presidential primary debate next week on CNN.
Fox hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will co-moderate the discussion with the GOP front-runner at an event to be broadcast at 9 p.m. ET Jan. 10 from Des Moines, Iowa, only days before the Iowa caucuses, Fox News reported Tuesday.
That is the same time as the CNN debate.
Trump last sat down with Baier in June. Baier and MacCallum co-moderated the first 2024 Republican primary debate in Milwaukee on Aug. 23, an event that averaged 13 million viewers, according to Fox News.
Trump decided to skip that debate and the ones that followed.
“New CBS POLL, just out, has me leading the field by ‘legendary’ numbers. … I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!” he said in a Truth Social post on Aug. 20.
Though there was some speculation in December that the former president would take part in the Jan. 10 debate, that ultimately proved unfounded.
To date, only Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley have qualified for the CNN debate, which will be moderated by the network’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, according to Deadline.
Participants had to meet a 10 percent polling threshold to qualify.
Will Trump win the GOP nomination?
The RealClearPolitics polling averages on Tuesday showed Trump at 62.5 percent, followed by DeSantis and Haley, both at 11.2 percent.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — in fourth place with 4.2 percent — blasted CNN for excluding him and announced he would be holding his own event in Des Moines on Jan. 10.
Ramaswamy, who has often been critical of CNN, called the network’s Jan. 10 debate “fake” in a Tuesday post on X and told his followers he will do a live show with podcaster Tim Pool that night.
“Forget @CNN’s fake Iowa ‘debate’ on Jan 10 which will be the most boring in modern history. We’re doing a live-audience show that night in Des Moines with @Timcast instead. Won’t hold back. Here’s the backstory on CNN’s shenanigans,” he wrote before listing some instances of those “shenanigans.”
Forget @CNN’s fake Iowa “debate” on Jan 10 which will be the most boring in modern history. We’re doing a live-audience show that night in Des Moines with @Timcast instead. Won’t hold back. Here’s the backstory on CNN’s shenanigans:
– On Dec 13, CNN disgracefully cut short its…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024
Trump has repeatedly said that he sees no reason to participate in the GOP debates since he has maintained a large lead in the polls.
“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” he said in the Aug. 20 post on Truth Social.
In a statement on Oct. 2, the former president urged the Republican Party to cancel any further debates “in order to refocus its manpower and money on preventing Democrats’ efforts to steal the 2024 election.”
The GOP primary race opens with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, followed by the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23 and South Carolina on Feb. 3.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is also still in the race for the GOP nomination, but faces stiff headwinds, low polling numbers — 3.4 percent, according to the RCP averages — and calls for him to drop out.
On Dec. 5, Sarah Matthews, a former Trump administration official who is now backing Haley, said Christie has “no path” to win the nomination.
“I think he did add a really important voice to the race, but obviously his whole campaign was centered around trying to deny Trump the nomination,” Matthews told The Hill. “And I think that right now, if he stays in the race, all he’s doing is helping Trump to secure the nomination, because he’s dividing the vote.”
Christie, though, denied that he has no chance and chided those “just doing math and adding up numbers.”
“That’s not the way voters vote. And so I would say to everybody out there: Let’s let the campaign move forward,” he said.
