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- Trump's campaign called on the Republican National Committee to halt future GOP primary debates.
- Trump has already skipped the first two Republican primary debates in recent months.
- Despite his absence, he's still the leading GOP presidential candidate.
After choosing to skip this election cycle's first two, former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign is pressing the Republican National Committee to cancel all of its remaining scheduled presidential primary debates.
In a joint statement released on Monday, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, the Trump campaign's senior advisors, said that the RNC needs to "immediately cancel the upcoming debate in Miami and end all future debates in order to refocus its manpower and money on preventing Democrats' efforts to steal the 2024 election."
"Anything less, along with other reasons not to cancel, are an admission to the grassroots that their concerns about voter integrity are not taken seriously and national Republicans are more concerned about helping Joe Biden than ensuring a safe and secure election," Wiles and LaCivita said.
A representative with the RNC did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
The Trump campaign's calls to put an end to the GOP's scheduled primary debates comes nearly a week after he decided to skip the second Republican debate that was hosted in California, which ultimately devolved into a deluge of the candidates yelling over one another.
The most recent debate, which included seven GOP candidates, was not the first time that Trump has chosen to skip the debate to instead watch his opponents from afar. He also skipped the first primary debate in late August, choosing instead to appear on a pretaped interview with former television host Tucker Carlson that went live just minutes before the debate began.
And while he did appear in several primary debates during his presidential run in 2015, he similarly skipped out on debating his GOP competition in Iowa in January 2016, which he said "turned out great."
Additionally, Trump also dropped out of the second presidential debate in 2020 after the Commission on Presidential Debates decided to make a scheduled debate between Trump and then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden take place online instead of in person because Trump had recently contracted COVID-19.
Though he has a history of missing out on debates, Trump far and away remains the GOP's leading presidential candidate in polling by a large margin. According to an average of national polls deemed "major" by FiveThirtyEight, the embattled former president is 41.7 percentage points ahead of the second-most popular candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.