Republican candidates leery of facing Donald Trump in upcoming GOP presidential debates should not be running at all, says Jeffrey Lord, who served as an aide to President Ronald Reagan and Housing Secretary Jack Kemp.
"It's really amazed me. In the beginning, there were some people who said he shouldn't go on the stage," Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"Some Republican donor was saying, well, he was going to see if he could start up a [campaign] to get the others to say no.
"The fact of the matter is that if they can't handle Donald Trump on that stage, they have no business being in the Oval Office where they would have to deal with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and all the rest of the world."
The first debate will be held Aug. 6 by Fox News, which is limiting the stage to the 10 Republican candidates who are leading in the national polls.
Trump — who many Republicans believe is hurting the party with his explosive comments about Mexican immigrants and incendiary style — is nonetheless seeing his poll numbers skyrocket.
According to a Fox News poll conducted July 13-15 of 1,019 registered voters, Trump leads all Republican presidential candidates for the 2016 race at 18 percent, an increase of 7 points since last month and 15 points since March.
Lord says Republican candidates facing Trump have no excuses for trying to shun him.
"I mean, let's go here guys. If you can't understand how to deal with this stuff.... That's what leadership is all about and they need to deal with this," Lord said.
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