Former President Donald Trump signaled to his fellow Republicans he is not interested in participating in the 2024 primary debates, at least as far as they’ve been planned to date.

The presumptive frontrunner took to social media to complain that “nobody got my approval, or the approval of the Trump Campaign, before announcing” the debates. Two events have been announced thus far, the first on Fox News and another at the Reagan Library in Simi, California.

Trump, who announced his bid for re-election last year, flexed his muscles on Truth Social, boasting, “When you’re leading by seemingly insurmountable numbers, and you have hostile Networks with angry, TRUMP & MAGA hating anchors asking the ‘questions,’ why to subject yourself to being libeled and abused?”

Trump wrote:

I see that everybody is talking about the Republican Debates, but nobody got my approval, or the approval of the Trump Campaign, before announcing them. When you’re leading by seemingly insurmountable numbers, and you have hostile Networks with angry, TRUMP & MAGA hating anchors asking the “questions,” why subject yourself to being libeled and abused? Also, the Second Debate is being held at the Reagan Library, the Chairman of which is, amazingly, Fred Ryan, Publisher of The Washington Post. NO!

It is an objectively weird flex given the 2016 primary debates are where Trump went from media curiosity to Republican nominee, despite zero experience serving in government — a trait he turned from weakness to strength.  There was one primary debate in which Trump opted not to participate in protest, which led some in the chattering class to speculate that was the beginning of the end. It was not.

Trump’s insistence that Republican debates run through him shows where he thinks he stands compared to the RNC, which has thus far agreed to everything he has asked for — while revealing who the most powerful person in the GOP truly is.

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