Donald Trump doesn't want to be asked to raise his hand during the next debate

The Republican presidential candidates are revolting! Angry over what they saw as petty questions and liberal bias at last week’s CNBC debate—several candidates spent the better part of last week talking about how unfair they felt the whole thing was—the campaigns met in Washington, D.C., Sunday night to try and overhaul their party’s debate process.

So what do they want? A lot of stuff, mostly depending on how they’re situated in the primary.

According to a report from The Washington Post, Jeb Bush wants to see a Telemundo debate reinstated. Donald Trump, for reasons that are perhaps obvious, said that is a non-starter. The lowest polling candidates want to see the so-called undercard debate done away so that their campaigns can receive “equal treatment.” Unsurprisingly, the Republicans who had been relegated to the kiddie table debates—Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, and Bobby Jindal—were behind the push to divide the 14 candidates, evenly and at random, into two debates that would receive equal airtime.

The impetus for the meeting—Republican candidates getting their fee-fees hurt by CNBC moderators who they claim asked “gotcha” questions—might be kind of silly, but restructuring the debates so that, moving forward, candidates have more time to talk about substantive policy questions that voters actually care about probably makes sense.

But not all of the reported requests were quite so reasonable. According to The New York Times, Trump’s campaign reportedly demanded that moderators no longer ask questions that require candidates to raise their hands. The reason? Trump was the only one to stick his paws up when Fox News moderators asked candidates during the first debate about refusing to rule out a third-party run.

The campaigns are expected to produce a full list of demands, which will be sent directly to the networks scheduled to host them, by Tuesday. And we won’t have to wait long to see how they shake out in practice: the next Republican debate is set for Nov. 10.

 
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