Former RNC chair says Trump's debate performance won't matter because his campaign is over


Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele took a strikingly pessimistic view of embattled GOP nominee Donald Trump's electoral chances in a brief interview with Mother Jones Saturday.
Trump's hot mic scandal "is a devastating blow to the Trump campaign and to the party, and there is not much either can do to salvage it," Steele said. "It almost doesn't matter what Trump does in the next debate." An unnamed GOP official similarly told Mother Jones the party's priorities should no longer be about 2016 but rather "about what happens in 20 years — and whether there is still a Republican Party then."
While many prominent Republicans have called on their party to dump Trump after hearing his sexually explicit comments, practical limitations at this point in the election make that a difficult prospect at best. The debate is Sunday night.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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