Has billionaire Donald Trump finally crossed the line or — as usual — will the Trumpistas not care and will Trump’s polls go up? He renewed his nearly obsessive feud with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly (calling her a “third rate reporter), swiped at Fox News’ Maven Roger Ailes for a “wiseguy press release,” and announced he won’t show up to Thursday’s Fox News Republican Presidential debate. In fact, his camp announced, he’ll get another network to air a competing event to raise money for charity (and try and take away Fox New’s debate ratings). Welcome to the sorry state of American politics in the 21st century where a candidate can now try and dictate which the reporter asks him questions and can pull out of a debate with supposedly serious pundits asking why it will now be worth watching at all if one candidate is not in the debate.

Don’t just blame Trump.

The reaction to this episode is a further sign of how far our once serious news media has fallen.

The big buzz is always on newspapers losing circulation, but broadcast journalism increasingly resembles a Pander Bear, rather than a watchdog.

The symbol of the decline of thoughtful punditry is now MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, a great political writer who increasingly seems overdosed on his own fame as a TV political personality. This quote from Matthews is not from The Onion but is from someone who is paid to be a serious political pundit:

“Who is going to watch a debate between the two Cuban guys?” Matthews said on Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s Hardball. “Who is going to watch a debate between Rubio, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Who cares? You know they’ve been fighting in this inter league fight over who is the hawkish guy or whatever. Who is going to watch that?”

Think about that:
1. So if Donald Trump is not in the debate, who will care about with Cruz, Rubio, or any of the others say on issues?
2. It underscores how so many media types now only care about ratings and what the audience wants to watch. Once upon a time news — particularly broadcast news — was seen as a kind of public stewardship.
3. Isn’t it possible that a debate without Trump could actually be more substantive?
4. So the only thing the highly paid Chris Matthews has picked up about Rubio and Cruz is that they only talk about who is the most hawkish? And, yeah, who’d want to watch these two CUBAN guys? As someone who has worked in the media and has watched Matthews, his comment makes me realize: Why would I now want to watch Chris Matthews?

This has been a day of escalating political drama tantrum throwing. The Washington Post:

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump abruptly announced here Tuesday that he would not participate in Thursday’s scheduled debate, escalating his off-and-on feud with Fox News Channel and throwing the GOP campaign into turmoil.

Trump’s assertion, which his campaign manager insisted was irreversible, came less than one week before the kickoff Iowa caucuses. He once again defied the conventional rules of politics, and used his power and prominence to shape the campaign agenda and conversation.

So far, Trump’s untraditional moves have only expanded his support, but his threatened boycott leaves him open to criticism that for all his tough talk he is ducking face-to-face confrontations with his opponents and scrutiny from the Fox moderators.

Given Trump’s past flirtations with boycotting Fox, many will doubt his declaration until they see the other candidates take the debate stage on Thursday night without him.

The Republican debates have become must-see television, in part because of the allure of Trump’s star power and unpredictable candidacy. But he said Tuesday that he thinks Fox and other television networks have been taking advantage of him by selling advertisements for their debates at a high premium.

“Why should the networks continue to get rich on the debates?” Trump told reporters at a news conference in Marshalltown. “Why do I have to make Fox rich?”

The debate is scheduled to be in Des Moines on Thursday, and Trump said he would instead host a competing event in the state designed to raise money for wounded veterans.

Trump is the first candidate in modern memory to say he would withdraw from a debate at such a consequential moment on the primary calendar.

Trump long has objected to the participation of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as one of the three moderators, claiming she has treated him unfairly with both her questioning of him at last August’s debate and her commentary since then.

Trump started the day by escalating his vendetta with Kelly via (as usual) his Twitter account and on TV interviews. And he was angered by two statements put out by Fox News — one serious suggesting that the Trump camp was even making death threats against Kelly, and the second a disdainful, snarky one aimed at Trump.

The serious statement passes the “smell test.” It’s an attempt to intimidate the reporter as well as the corporation and Fox News correctly rejected it:

But the sarcastic response to Trump seems to have been the final straw:

“We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president,” Fox News said in the statement, adding this gem: “A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”

The reference to Twitter lampoons Trump asking his Twitter followers about whether he should do the debate:

Donald Trump is skipping Thursday’s GOP debate and going to war with the Fox News Channel.
Instead of attending the debate, “We’ll have an event here in Iowa, with potentially another network, to raise money for wounded warriors,” campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said. “And Fox will go from probably having 24 million viewers to about 2 million.”

The fracas escalated quickly on Tuesday, but was the culmination of months of tension between the GOP frontrunner and the Fox News host Megyn Kelly.
At the end of the day, Fox said Trump “is still welcome” at the debate “and will be treated fairly,” but the network also slammed Trump for “viciously” attacking Kelly and accused Lewandowski of threatening her.

So the question now is: which network will reveal itself so hungry for ratings that they will open up their airwaves to Trump using a charity as a way to mask a clearly political move? Make your bets now.

But also make your bets on whether in the end a)he’ll find a way to agree to attend b)ratings will go sky high c)pundits will again enable Trump and his style of politics by later declaring if he attends the debate what an utter genius he is with the media. The fault isn’t only with Trump. He reflects a decaying political system and a media driven by ratings and notoriety that he knows how to perfectly play.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign issued its own press release:

As someone who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time, The Art of the Deal, who has built an incredible company, including some of the most valuable and iconic assets in the world, and as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts.

Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn’t play games. There have already been six debates, and according to all online debate polls including Drudge, Slate, Time Magazine, and many others, Mr. Trump has won all of them, in particular the last one. Whereas he has always been a job creator and not a debater, he nevertheless truly enjoys the debating process – and it has been very good for him, both in polls and popularity.

He will not be participating in the FOX News debate and will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. Like running for office as an extremely successful person, this takes guts and it is the kind of mentality our country needs in order to Make America Great Again.

Hot Air’s Allahpundit raises the issue whether in the end Trump will in fact show up:

The fact that he won’t absolutely commit to skipping the debate even in the clip below, when he’s pretending to throw down the gauntlet over how mean the Fox News staffer who wrote today’s press release was, tells you there’s still a 95 percent chance that he’ll be there on Thursday. The media is oohing and aahing over Trump’s showmanship on Twitter as I write this but the truth is it’s a tactical error twice over, first because he can’t afford to let Cruz attack his record unrebutted on a big stage four days before Iowa goes to vote and second because it’s now in Roger Ailes’s power to exclude Trump from the debate if he wants to. All Ailes needs to do to kick him out is issue a statement explaining that debate logistics are complicated, that Fox has been blindsided by Trump’s boycott and is scrambling right now to re-plan the event without him, and that there simply won’t be enough time to overhaul everything again tomorrow if Trump changes his mind. They’ll have to go forward without him. Maybe Ailes won’t go that route; maybe he’ll call Trump up tonight, tell him to stop acting like a whiny baby, and then Trump will go out there tomorrow morning and claim that Ailes begged, begged him to attend until he couldn’t say no. At least, Trump better hope that’s what happens. Otherwise you’re going to hear about 18 variations on Thursday night of the question, “How can you stand up to China if you can’t stand up to Megyn Kelly?”

No matter what happens, Trump will not have helped his image among those who aren’t already Trumpistas — those folks who believe he can fix Washington because he says he can (without offering specifics). This includes among some conservatives. The Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow:

This feud has gotten ridiculous. Republican front-runner and businessman Donald Trump is now threatening to boycott the upcoming GOP debate if host Fox News doesn’t remove Megyn Kelly as a moderator.

I don’t usually like the argument that takes the form of, “if candidate can’t stand up to X, how can they stand up to the Islamic State?” But I do wonder how Trump will be able to handle anyone as president if he can’t take the sort of pointed questions about his weaknesses that originally soured him on Kelly.

…How will Trump handle a hostile press if he is president? We know the press will be more harsh toward a Republican president, and that the press is especially hostile toward Trump, so will he just shut them out? And does Megyn Kelly, on a right-leaning network, really need to be public enemy number one to the Trump campaign?

I realize that this, like everything Trump does, is for attention, but it ultimately brings into question his ability to handle adversity and criticism.

So place your bets now. Will he show up in the end and once again be called a media genius by the media that does indeed use him to increase audience share and hits?

Will analysts say (as they have before) that an emotional, headline grabbing feud helped Trump and Fox?

Will CNN or some other network broadcast a special Trump fundraiser to compete with the Fox News debate if he indeed walks?

And, if a network does so, then how will that network explain not having televised such a fundraiser before if it truly cares about the charity wasn’t just scrounging for Trump-love ratings?

Never has a phrase more aptly fit:

Stay tuned.‘

Hey, Trump is already being declared a genius for this big flap. Politico:

Donald Trump did it again.
With less than 150 hours before the Iowa caucuses, Trump thrust himself squarely into the center of the political conversation and the news cycle with his surprise declaration that he would boycott the final debate before voting begins in Iowa.

Trump has blustered about boycotting debates multiples times before but never followed through. But the rhetoric Tuesday from Trump and his campaign team was, by far, the sternest and most forceful to date.
Ted Cruz, Trump’s chief Iowa rival, immediately challenged Trump to a one-on-one debate, as his aides and supporters tried to get the hashtag “#DonaldDuck” trending on Twitter.
At a combative press conference before a rally here, Trump said he wouldn’t participate in Thursday’s Fox News showdown because co-moderator Megyn Kelly is biased against him, and because he found Fox’s response to his concerns childish.
“Let’s see how they do at the debate,” Trump said. “Let’s see how many people watch.”

The 2016 GOP debates have drawn record audiences and Trump and his team have seemed to relish their leverage over the networks, which are converting those audiences into big ad dollars. Back in August, Trump challenged CNN to give $10 million to charity. The network didn’t. He appeared at its debate anyway.
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told reporters that plans are already in the works for a competing event when Thursday’s debate is scheduled to air.
“We’ll have an event here in Iowa, with potentially another network, to raise money for Wounded Warriors and Fox will go from having probably 24 million viewers for the debate to, you know, 2 million viewers,” Lewandowski said.

And the country’s serious issues? (“The WHAT?”)

A CROSS SECTION OF TWEETS:

"We have guys who are afraid to go into a debate," Trump on those skipping his 2011 debate. https://t.co/Ut3bk4PaIG

— andrew kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) January 27, 2016

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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