Provo • John Curtis stood quietly at the podium while his two opponents in the race for Utah’s vacant congressional seat took turns criticizing President Donald Trump.
“Our president has gotten us to the brink of nuclear war,” said Democrat Kathie Allen during a debate Wednesday night.
“There is no more reprehensible element of the Trump administration than the immigration policies,” said the new United Utah Party’s Jim Bennett.
“I think that I might start by taking Donald Trump’s phone away,” Allen added to laughs from the crowd of roughly 200.
“Donald Trump is not a responsible chief executive,” Bennett commented.
Curtis, the conservative Provo mayor, made little mention of the president and offered no opinion on the administration. None of the eight questions posed by audience members and students at Brigham Young University required him to do so.
“In a debate format like this, we just have way too much to say and not enough time to say it. It was not a conscious effort at all,” the mayor told reporters after the event hosted by the Utah Debate Commission.
Curtis has maintained that he supports the Trump agenda on economics, taxes and defense, and that he ignores the president’s “distractions.”
“If you’re defining the Trump agenda as divisiveness, meanness, bullying, not respecting women and minorities, of course I abhor that,” he said.
During the hourlong showdown, the contenders discussed gun control, public lands and education. It also marked the first time a minor-party candidate has participated in the selective debate since the commission began hosting them in 2014.
Bennett, who narrowly qualified for the event after a recommissioned poll put him above the threshold, billed himself throughout the night as the “genuinely independent” candidate in a “dysfunctional” two-party system. He was a Republican but left the party when it nominated Trump in the 2016 presidential race.
He also questioned Curtis’ stance on a proposed wall between the United States and Mexico after the mayor ran and later removed two ads on Facebook — one exhorting Congress to “build the wall” and the other calling to “stop sanctuary cities.”
“I still don’t know whether or not he supports a border wall,” Bennett said.
Curtis has said that he isn’t married to the idea of a physical barrier but wants to secure the nation in whatever way would be most effective. He called Bennett’s attack “a little disingenuous.”
Bennett and Curtis aligned the most on health care, with each calling for reforms to include more free-market initiatives (though Bennett would also like to see expansions of catastrophic coverage).
Allen, a longtime physician and first-time candidate, supports universal health care and poked at Curtis, who ran a shooting-range company for 10 years, for having less firsthand involvement with medicine.
“Mayor Curtis, you have experience in guns. I have experience in healing,” she said.
“I respect you as a medical professional,” he responded. “But I have experience being a patient.”
The small barbs and slight punches continued from there. Bennett said there was “complete silence” from Curtis‘ campaign after the mass shooting in Las Vegas this month. Curtis said next time he’ll make sure that Bennett is “informed of all of our decisions.” Allen tried to align Curtis with Trump and told Bennett that “parties of one get nothing done.”
One of the most divisive issues was relations with North Korea. Allen insisted that negotiation with the totalitarian regime is the best solution. Bennett said Trump is needlessly incendiary on social media in prodding the country’s leader Kim Jong Un and calling him “rocket man.” Curtis said sanctions don’t work and that a partnership with China is the key.
He later said Trump’s tweets are “far out on the periphery” of the issue, and he passed twice when offered a rebuttal — once on North Korea and a second time on the Department of Education, which he would seek to eliminate.
The three candidates agreed on banning bump stocks, which convert semiautomatic rifles into essentially automatic guns, after they were used by the Las Vegas gunman.
The debate, the third in two weeks, comes as ballots arrive in mailboxes throughout the 3rd District. It also follows a new poll that shows Curtis with a commanding 27-point lead in the reliably red district.
The Nov. 7 special election was spurred by former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz stepping down midway through his fifth term.