Newsmax served up some basic coverage of the Jan. 10 Republican presidential debate between the two remaining non-Trump candidates, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley:
- DeSantis Hits Haley as ‘Mealy-Mouthed Politician’ in Final Iowa Debate
- Haley to DeSantis: ‘You Can’t Manage a Campaign; How Are You Going to Manage’ US?
- DeSantis, Haley Agree: ‘Donald Trump Should Be on This Stage’
- DeSantis: You Can’t Take the Ambassador Out of the UN
Earlier in the day, Newsmax had published a wire article insisting that the election should be about President Biden, not Donald Trump. Speaking of whom, Newsmax devoted a few articles to the town hall Trump held instead of taking part in the debate:
- Trump Tells Iowa Town Hall Christie Right About Haley
- Trump to Iowa: Ultimate Revenge? Make America Great
- Trump to Iowa: Dems Will End Nonviable Sanctuary Cities
This was all followed by a Jan. 11 column by John Gizzi who effectively declared that the winner of the DeSantis-Haley debate was … Trump:
“Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were like a couple in a bad marriage,” Chapman University (California) professor Luke Nichter told Newsmax following the Wednesday night debate in Iowa between Donald Trump’s two leading opponents for the Republican presidential nomination.
But Nichter, author of the critically acclaimed “The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968,” flipped back and forth on television between the DeSantis-Haley showdown on CNN and Trump’s town hall televised by Fox News.
He concluded the Trump event was “a refreshing format – questions from actual normal, voting Americans as opposed to moderators armed with prompts vetted by focus groups.”
In contrast, Nichter added, “The two governors – perhaps because their views are so similar – resorted to scripted digs that, to this viewer, made each more unlikeable.”
[…]Gerard Gibert, Mississippi’s most-listened to radio talk show host, concluded, “overall, I felt the governors showed that they are fairly closely aligned on major issues, the exception perhaps being support for Ukraine.”
But, he quickly added, “rather than focusing out how they differed from the other candidate on economic and tax policy, healthcare, immigration, school choice, and abortion, DeSantis and Haley attacked each other on their opponent’s failure to live up to the policies that achieve the outcomes on which they’re largely aligned. They did this by exposing each other’s resumes as governors and Mr. DeSantis’ time in Congress.”
Those policy positions, Gibert continued, “are mostly aligned with Mr. Trump’s. For voters, it’s a question of who you want steering the ship filled with the same cargo headed to the same destination.
“Winner, former President Donald Trump.”
Later in the day, an article by Mark Swanson touted how “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign released a new TV ad Thursday that targets former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s plan to raise the retirement age and cut social security benefits.”