Unfortunately, conservative punditry appears to becoming as transactional as liberal punditry. For example, as far as last Wednesday night’s GOP debate was concerned, it seems like many various pundits were incapable of separating who they support for the presidential nomination from who they think “won” the matchup.

Even on the right, Gaslighting is sadly commonplace.

As a callback to when Donald Trump first entered politics, whether you like him or not, it’s one thing for so-called principled conservatives to oppose Trump.

It’s quite another when many of them adopted the Democrat agenda after they started collected a check from MSNBC, CNN, or another corporate outlet.

Again, it’s transactional, and puts the “con” in conservative.

Now an ongoing debate has emerged about whether the alternative programming to the debate, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Trump on X (formerly Twitter), which at this writing has about 260 million views, was a bigger success than the debate on the Fox News Channel, however the term views vs. watchers is defined.

A lot of the pro-Trump partisans were bragging about it.

On the other hand, there also seems to be a concerted effort in the liberal corporate media to downplay Tucker’s reach on social media, whatever the actual number happens to be.

For the ordinary voter, does it really matter that much?

Scrolling through Twitter on debate night, which reportedly had a viewership of about 12 million, it did seem like the event — some likened it to a junior varsity game — was boring.

After referencing several sources that crunched the numbers, Legal Insurrection blogger “Fuzzy Slippers” insisted that “For our Only Trumper readers this means that Tucker’s Trump interview did garner more views than the GOP debate . . . by about two million views.”

That said, the transactional infighting between Team Trump and Team DeSantis is petty, disappointing, tedious, and hardly helpful to putting the country back on track.

Apart from the Democrat machine, the only winners in that back and forth are the grifting campaign consultants.

It would be more desirable if the candidates themselves cut it out, but that’s probably not going to happen.

It’s reasonable to presume that lots of people on the America First side of the ledger would gladly vote for Trump, DeSantis, or Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 general election.

The other Republican candidates not so much, or any candidate for that matter, who is bloviating about abortion after the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision sent this personal, sensitive matter back to the individual states to regulate.

And most of the candidates still think it’s wonderful idea to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into Ukraine.

Another reason why the GOP is often called the Stupid Party, although apparently the question selection by the FNC moderators was lackluster.

No real surprise there.

That aside, as a commentator on Legal Insurrection appropriately mentioned, “Seems a whole bunch of DeSantis supporters are upset Trump drew more people watching him than watched DeSantis.”

It’s actually possible to have two thoughts simultaneously.

That is, you can be pro-DeSantis and still acknowledge that the Trump-Tucker conversation got more views.

You can be pro-Trump and still think that the Tucker interview was not great, too passive, and as such, included too much filibustering by Trump [Some interviewers infuriatingly interrupt a guest too much — that’s an entirely different subject.]

There is a lot of cherry picking of polling data happening as well. It’s actually okay to support a certain candidate and at the same time acknowledge that that certain candidate lags behind by some polling metrics (assuming polling data is accurate or relevant when ballot harvesting is going to be the decisive issue).

And again, pro-Trump doesn’t necessarily mean you have to anti-DeSantis, either, and vice versa.

And as another Legal Insurrection commentator appropriately observed, “Why do you think that reported ‘viewings’”’ on TV are any different? Do you think that everyone who turned the debate on sat there and watched the whole thing??”

In this video clip, the Valuetainment crew discusses the audience-size analytics: