It should be obvious to everyone after Wednesday night that there can be no substitute for Donald Trump when it comes to the next GOP presidential nomination. Trump sat down for a funny, charming and interesting conversation with Tucker Carlson that was a must-see event.

The eight runners-up challenging each other for second place appeared for the first debate on Faux News, where they took turns regurgitating tired and ancient Bob Dole bumper sticker slogans from 1996. None of the eight on the losers’ stage are qualified to run the Republican Party in 2024 and beyond, let alone the United States.

Faux News is hyping the fact that nearly 50 million viewers tuned in for the first GOP debate. What they’re not telling anyone is that most of those viewers only showed up for the second hour. We were all busy watching Tucker with the real nominee for the first hour or so.

More than 75 million people watched the Trump-Tucker interview in the first hour. As of this writing, more than 230 million have watched it on Twitter. In other words, more than two-thirds of the entire country tuned in to hear Donald Trump’s vision for America.

Tucker’s questions for Trump were, quite frankly, amazing.

“Why aren’t you at the Fox News debate tonight in Milwaukee?”

“You say there are people on stage who shouldn’t be running for president. Who do you mean?”

“Whatever happened to Mike Pence?”

“Do you think Epstein killed himself?”

“Do you think we’re moving toward civil war?”

“They stole it from you last time, why wouldn’t they do the same thing this time?”

“It started with protests against you. Then it moved to impeachment, twice, and now indictment. Are you worried that they’re gonna try and kill you? Why wouldn’t they try and kill you?”

As a side note to everything else, it’s amazing to see Tucker back in action with the leash off. Those are substantive questions for the former president, and like nothing that was asked of the eight kids at the losers table were asked on Faux News.

“Raise your hand if you support more money for Ukraine.”

Snore.

As for the other eight “candidates,” none of the meet the basic baseline that we should expect from an America First candidate to lead the party. I only had one question that I wanted to ask them last night, and obviously Faux News didn’t ask it.

That question is: “Polling consistently shows that 70 to 85% of Republican voters and more than half of Democrat voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Why are you so out of step with the American electorate on this issue?”

Only one of the eight candidates on Faux News was even willing to say that climate change is a hoax (Vivek Ramaswamy). Really, guys? That should be a bare-minimum baseline for any Republican leader.

“Climate change is real!” wailed Nimrata Randhawa (Nikki Haley).

That was sad. The Republican Party is in shambles without Donald Trump at the helm. These are the best candidates who the party can put forward for America?

One Twitter user summed up the sadness of the debate well with this quote: “American democracy in 2023: Two Indians arguing about how much taxpayer money should go to Israel.”

What about the American people, guys?

Some other quick impressions from the Faux News debate, from the left to right side of the screen:

Asa Hutchinson and Chris Krispy Kreme and were both nearly booed off the stage when they tried to bash Trump. Ron DeSantis waited to raise his hand on a lot of questions until he knew whether the crowd was cheering for an issue or not. Way to be decisive! Mike Pence sounded like he was regurgitating Bob Dole’s 1996 talking points for most of the evening and has no clue what time it is in America.

Vivek Ramaswamy was a charming jerk. I’m starting to come around to the theory that he’s actually a Trump plant who is in the race to play the villain, sort of like the bad guy in a pro wrestling act. Nicki Haley is a bloodthirsty globalist. Tim Scott is a nice man with zero charisma and will never be elected. And who even was that guy on the right side of the stage? I’ve literally never seen him before. Why was he even up there? I’m not even sure what his name was.

The Trump interview with Tucker Carlson was substantive and meaningful, while the GOP “debate” was a tiresome and meaningless farce. Because it is important, here is the full Trump-Tucker discussion for posterity’s sake: