The Republican National Committee has ended its planned partnership with National Review for a GOP presidential debate next month in Texas, with the publisher of the conservative magazine citing its new anti-Donald Trump edition as the reason.
“Tonight, a top official with the RNC called me to say that National Review was being disinvited,” publisher Jack Fowler wrote in a blog post late Thursday. “The reason: Our ’Against Trump’ editorial and symposium. We expected this was coming. Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.”
The publication’s latest edition includes an editorial laying out the case against Mr. Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, as well as anti-Trump testimonials from a number of prominent conservatives.
RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said Friday they can’t have people involved in the debate process who have forcefully come out for or against a candidate.
“We saw this piece come out last night … it really didn’t take long to realize that it would be highly inappropriate to have a debate partner or, frankly, a moderator that would have stated a previous position pro or con any individual candidate,” Mr. Spicer said on CNN. “So we immediately informed them that we would no longer be having them as a partner.”
The late-February debate also originally had NBC as a partner, but the RNC replaced NBC with CNN earlier this month. In October, the RNC had suspended its partnership with NBC for the debate, saying the Oct. 28 debate hosted by CNBC was conducted in bad faith.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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