Republican presidential front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson may boycott the next debate if CNBC doesn’t allow opening or closing statements and runs the debate for longer than 2 hours including commercials.
Several GOP campaigns have voiced concern to both the Republican National Committee and the television network over the next debate’s criteria. Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson went further, both signing a joint letter threatening to skip the event if their demands weren’t met.
“Neither Mr. Trump or Dr. Carson will participate in your debate if it is longer than 120 minutes including commercials and does not include opening and closing statements,” the letter, obtained by NBC News and signed by both candidates, reads.
“Both our campaigns hope that you will agree with these very reasonable format changes so that CNBC may present all the Republican candidates to your audience,” the candidates wrote.
CNBC issued a memo to the campaigns where opening and closing statements weren’t included, and a time length wasn’t established, indicating those elements were discussed and agreed upon by all participating.
“The criteria that was outlined by CNBC was never discussed with any of the candidates or the campaigns,” Mr. Trump’s campaign manager Cory Lewandowski told The New York Times on Thursday. “So what CNBC did was send out a memo and said, ’Here’s the criteria as you have approved them,’ and that went out to all the campaigns. We said we never agreed to this criteria.”
“For us, it was imperative that the time be changed to 120 minutes” for the length of the debate, Mr. Lewandowski told The Times. Mr. Trump had openly voiced his discontent with the most recent nearly three-hour debate hosted by CNN as being too long.
“Until we have this criteria specifically laid out, it is difficult to participate” Mr. Lewandowski said, The Times reported.
Mr. Trump went to Twitter to voice his discontent.
“The @GOP should not agree to the ridiculous debate terms that @CNBC is asking unless there is a major benefit to the party,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Thursday.
CNBC seems willing to change its criteria, and agreed it would “take the candidates’ views on the format into consideration,” going forward, according to CNBC spokesman Brian Steel.
“Our goal is to host the most substantive debate. Our practice in the past has been to forego opening statements to quickly address the critical issues that matter most to the American people,” Mr. Steel said in a statement. “We started a dialogue yesterday with all of the campaigns involved and we will certainly take the candidates’ views on the format into consideration as we finalize the debate structure.”
Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and other “outsider” candidate took to Twitter to poke fun at both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson’s demands.
“Seems @JebBush isn’t only low energy guy!” Mrs. Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores tweeted. “Looks like @realDonaldTrump @RealBenCarson don’t have endurance to debate @CarlyFiorina for 3hrs.”
The next Republican debate is set for Oct. 28 at Coors Event Center in Boulder, Colorado.
• Kelly Riddell can be reached at kriddell@washingtontimes.com.
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