Less than 24 hours after 11 GOP presidential campaigns agreed to cut the RNC out of negotiations for network debates, Donald Trump's camp has opted to go at it alone,
The Washington Post reports.
The Post quoted unnamed Republican officials who declined to be named since Trump's campaign had yet not made the announcement.
Two Trump officials were at
Sunday night's meeting in Washington, D.C. in which a plan was hammered out for the campaigns to return to the practice of negotiating directly with networks hosting debates, but the Post reported that the Trump campaign did not sign the group's letter drafted there.
"If they want to send their own letter, that's fine – a letter's a letter," Ben Carson's campaign manager Barry Bennett told the newspaper. "The Trump folks were clear about what they wanted, and the Carson campaign agrees with them 90 percent of the time. We're getting opening and closing statements. We're going to get some parity in questions. We're going to actually get formats announced to the campaigns. Trump is basically asking for the same thing, he's just going to do [it] with his own letterhead."
The only major differences between the two front-runners — Trump and Carson — is that Carson wanted more candidates onstage rather than relegating those with the lowest poll ratings on an "undercard" debate.
That, Bennett said, is because, "They don't want more people onstage, because they think that would mean more people taking shots at him." But Bennett said more people onstage would actually help Trump most "as everyone's going to want to divide the time evenly."
The Sunday meeting was called after last week's disastrous CNBC debate that was panned by most of the candidates, the RNC and even some mainstream media observers.
The cable business channel had said the debate would focus on economic issues, but the moderators veered into other areas, including asking Trump if he was running a "comic book" campaign and asking Mike Huckabee, an ordained minister, if Trump had the moral authority to lead.
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