Donald Trump, in Absentia, Looms Large Over Fox News Debate: Column

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Wednesday night’s Republican debate on Fox News — the first of the 2024 election cycle — ended up, perhaps predictably, feeling like the undercard.

After all, it isn’t just that the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump, wasn’t on the stage, by his own choice. (During the debate, he appeared in an online interview with the host Tucker Carlson, once of Fox News and now an independent operator.) It’s that, since his appearance at the equivalent first-of-the-cycle debate on Fox News in 2015, Trump has set the agenda for the party and, perhaps, the network.

And he hasn’t ceded the stage, even as he won’t, now, appear on it. That first debate of 2015 — memorably co-moderated by Megyn Kelly, whose questioning of Trump about his history of sexism made for a memorable narrative and, eventually, a Hollywood movie (2019’s “Bombshell”) — set Trump as a force to be reckoned with in the party.

And this first debate of 2023 did a great deal to avoid the reckoning. At an an ad-break at around the halfway point, the broadcast showed a live shot of Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, where Trump is expected to surrender Thursday on one of the several sets of charges he’s racked up so far (this time for racketeering and conspiracy).