By Steve Adubato, PhD

A lot happened in last night’s Fox News ‪GOP Debate, but for me two huge leadership issues played out and both were hard to watch on every level. The first was when Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly simply asked leading GOP candidate, Donald Trump, to explain his grotesque and totally unacceptable past descriptions of women including ‪”fat pigs,” ”dogs‪,” ”slobs” and ‪”disgusting animals.” Ever the showman, Trump tried to duck responsibility at first with a snarky one-liner saying he was only talking about ‪Rosie O’Donnell – as if that would make it acceptable. When Megan Kelly pressed him on the fact that this simply wasn’t true, Trump - who never is accountable for his past comments or actions (a terrible leadership trait) - launched into an absurd diatribe about political correctness and then accused Kelly of not being nice to him and threatened to be "not nice" to her for simply asking him a direct question about something he didn’t want to talk about.

This is a classic case, once again, of why Donald Trump is no leader at all. What real leader talks about women – at least half the people in America and on this earth – in such a disrespectful fashion? What could he possibly be thinking? And then when confronted about it, what legitimate leader doesn’t have the integrity or decency to say he was wrong instead of attacking the female journalist who asked him to explain his comments? The answer – Donald Trump, the leading GOP candidate for President.

The second leadership issue from last night’s debate? The fact that not one of the other Republican Presidential candidates had the courage to stand up to Trump and challenge him on his misogynistic, anti-women comments - not to mention his totally unprovoked and cowardly attack on Megan Kelly. My sense is that the other candidates didn’t take Trump on for fear of having his wrath turned on them, and in the process demonstrated a glaring lack of leadership. And lacking leadership is a huge impediment to being a strong President who will have to stand up to much tougher and scarier characters than Donald Trump.
That’s what I think when it comes to the issue of leadership and last night’s Presidential debate.