Donald Trump will skip Fox News debate on Thursday

Rewriting the book of campaign rules once more, Donald Trump is skipping Thursday's GOP debate and attacking the Fox News Channel.

Instead of attending the debate, "We'll have an event here in Iowa, with potentially another network, to raise money for wounded warriors," campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said. "And Fox will go from probably having 24 million viewers to about 2 million."

The fracas escalated quickly on Tuesday, but was the culmination of months of tension between the GOP frontrunner and the Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

At a press conference Tuesday evening Trump said he was outraged by a "wiseguy" press release that Fox issued earlier in the day. In it, Fox playfully mocked Trump.

"Let's see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me, okay?" Trump said, asserting that the ratings will sink if he's not there.

In a followup statement later in the evening, Trump's campaign said Trump "knows when to walk away."

"Roger Ailes and Fox News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn't play games," the campaign said. Ailes is the chairman of Fox News.

 

So now the network and the candidate are at loggerheads. Political observers were flabbergasted. Was Trump bluffing, they wondered, or will he really hold a competing event on Thursday night?

Media analysts asked whether Fox would leave an empty podium at center stage during Thursday's event, which is the last GOP debate before the all-important Iowa caucuses.

Fox had no immediate response to Trump. But Kelly addressed the controversy on her prime time show.

"Trump is used to controlling things," she remarked, but "he doesn't get to control the media."

Kelly challenged Trump during Fox's first debate back in August and will be back in one of the moderator chairs on Thursday. Trump says she is biased and shouldn't be allowed to moderate. Fox rejects that. On Monday the network said Trump is just "fearful" of the TV host.

The disagreement came to a head on Tuesday afternoon. Around 1 p.m. Trump polled his fans on Twitter, asking, "Should I do the GOP debate?"

 

The poll suggested a real reluctance to attend, perhaps because Trump, as the frontrunner, arguably has the most to lose on Thursday night. The respondents were evenly split, with about half saying he should skip it.

In an Instagram video that coincided with his poll, Trump said, "Megyn Kelly's really biased against me. She knows that, I know that, everybody knows that. Do you really think she can be fair at a debate?"

Fox interpreted his video as a serious escalation in an ongoing war of words.

An hour later, a network spokesperson issued a tongue-in-cheek statement imagining Trump conducting Twitter polls in the Oval Office.

"We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings," the statement said.

Related: Donald Trump vs. Megyn Kelly: The sequel begins

The intended message to Trump was clear: "Grow up."

When Trump read the statement, he shot back with a tweet, calling it a "pathetic attempt by Fox News to try and build up ratings for the #GOPDebate."

He added, "Without me they'd have no ratings!"

News Courtesy: www.cnn.com