“I was tougher when it wasn’t very politically popular to be tough”, he said last week. “And I took a lot of heat”. Expectations that his campaign would fizzle out have been dashed as he has remained atop the polls since the summer. Luntz then asked the candidates to raise their hands if they agree with Cruz; not one immediately did so, but former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee interjected that while it would be nice for Kerry to resign, he would most prefer the president step down. And Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Lindsey Graham are all in New Hampshire.
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Ted Cruz announced yesterday that he is putting together a “national prayer team”, which will send him good Christian vibes as he navigates the campaign trail.
Mr Trump, however, wasn’t done roiling the Republican race.
“I would hope that all candidates for public office would refrain from making derogatory characterizations of Syrian refugees, and instead focus on solving the problem”, he said.
“We’re seeing universities all across this country with leftist-coddled kids, usually with trust funds, protesting against the disgusting oppression because the microaggression – ‘I heard a word that scared me, ‘” Cruz said.
The comments were derided at the time. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse. This year, the “outsider” candidates, like Mr. Trump, Mr. Cruz and Ben Carson, possess as much organizational, financial and personal strength as the establishment candidates, or maybe more.
“If you’ve got a bowl with five grapes in it and three of them are bad you’re not going to eat any of the grapes because they could be really bad”, said Gibson Gray of Blountsville, Alabama.
Mr Carson said that it would be “almost malpractice” for IS not to try to infiltrate the refugees streaming into Western nations. “Trump pointed out in that he’s now content with his position in the polls”.
Many conservatives eye Marco Rubio suspiciously on the issue thanks to his leadership of the 2013 comprehensive reform effort in the US Senate, for instance. “It’s that we can’t”.
The effects of Trump’s remarks have not been to force most of the party’s leading candidates of the non-populist variety to recoil in horror.
“There should be a lot of systems beyond databases”, Trump told NBC News. We want to go with watch lists.
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before”. It perhaps marks a new phase in the campaign. He attempted to launch into a defense of the religious practices in the vast majority of American mosques when Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly repeated her question.
Jeb Bush was the first to do so: And no one is testing the bounds of political decency right now more than Donald Trump.
“You talk about closing mosques, you talk about registering people, that’s just wrong”, he said on CNBC. “That’s not strength; that’s weakness”.
To be sure, this fear isn’t limited to the Republican Party. “We have no idea who these people are”.
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Wacky ideas and the scrambling to wound Trump might make for a spectator sport for Democrats, but they’re not doing much for Republican ambitions for the White House. “We can’t have them”, he announced to a crowd of around 2,000 supporters.
