One day after Donald Trump announced he won’t be participating in Thursday’s Republican debate on Fox News, event moderator Megyn Kelly said she will be “surprised if he doesn’t show up,” but that it’s “going to be OK” either way.
“I will be surprised if he doesn’t show up. Donald Trump is a showman, he’s very good at generating interest,” Kelly told Extra on Wednesday. “Perhaps this is an effort to generate interest in our debate. If it is that is great, maybe we will have more eyeballs. If he doesn’t show up maybe we will have fewer eyeballs, but either way it is going to be OK.”
Fox also didn’t waste any time responding to the boycott.
“It should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing — Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August,” Fox said about the GOP frontrunner’s decision to skip the debate.
The network issued that statement Tuesday evening, about an hour after Trump announced he’d be a no-show. Trump’s debate withdrawal came after he asked Fox to remove Kelly as a debate moderator and the network refused.
“Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away,” the Trump campaign said.
Kelly also took the time to clarify whether she has any bias against Trump given their record of heated exchanges. Their rocky relationship started in August when Kelly listed all the derogatory terms the business mogul has used for women over the years, including, “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”
Trump responded shortly after, telling CNN’s Don Lemon that the Fox News host had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” a comment that many interpreted as a reference to menstruation.
“Of course there is no bias there whatsoever,” Kelly said. “I neither like nor dislike him, I don’t have any feelings about them. I study these guys as subjects, they are subjects for me to study and to help the audience get to know, so I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about him.”