Last night, the fourth Republican debate took place in Alabama; Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis took the stage. Immediately thereafter, news outlets started publishing “takeaways” and declaring winners. (Notably absent was the frontrunner in the polls, Donald Trump.) We were curious, in the lead-up to this debate, about what goes on behind the scenes of this staged media event, so we asked Antonia Hitchens, who’s been reporting on the presidential campaign, to write a dispatch from the “spin room,” where she spent one of the previous debates, in September, in Simi Valley.
I drove from my apartment in LA to Simi Valley to attend the second Republican presidential debate, and when I arrived, at 1 P.M., the media lot was already so full that I had to park on grass, like at a music festival. Three women from a national newspaper got out of the rental car next to me, carrying their blazers over their arms to put on later, talking about trying the twenty-dollar smoothie at Erewhon while they were in town. I waited in line to board a bus that brought us to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a mission-style building on a mountaintop, overlooking the valley below. I followed streams of people from the bus into a huge white tent, like at a wedding, for journalists to file their stories.
Inside, dozens of long tables were draped in navy tablecloths and littered with advertisements for Reagan’s Bar and Bistro, which was serving made-to-order food from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M., during filing time. The Reagan Library has a partial replica of the White House Rose Garden and a full-scale replica of Reagan’s Oval Office and the Situation Room; the media “filing zone” had been set up on the “White House South Lawn.” Also scattered on the property are an F-117 Nighthawk, an F-14, and an Abrams tank. Fox News, the event’s host, hung its Fox Business “Democracy 2024” banner opposite a banner advertising the Southern California showing of a traveling exhibit called Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. I walked past it to the museum gift shop, where the Ventura County bomb squad browsed together in a small group, looking at “Commander in Chief” desk decals.
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