Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination could face its stiffest challenge on the debate stage Thursday night as top rivals Florida Sen.
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Romney, who has yet to endorse a Republican candidate, offered a pathway for attacking Trump, telling Fox News on Wednesday that Trump was bound to have a “bombshell” in his tax records.
One of the big questions since Trump has taken the lead has been when Rubio would go on the attack.
Speaking on concerns over whether Trump would replace late justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court with another conservative, Cruz said Trump’s contributions to Democrats prove he could not “possibly care about having principled constitutionalists on the court”.
“You’ve hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled”, Rubio said. “You should be ashamed of yourself”. If Trump hadn’t inherited millions of dollars from his father, Rubio said, he’d be “selling watches in Manhattan”.
Rubio was the principal aggressor of the night, and he held nothing back. Taking on Trump’s declaration that he’d build a wall on the Mexican border, Rubio declared: “If he builds a wall the way he built Trump Tower he’ll be using illegal immigration to do it”.
Trump, for his part, insisted that even though officials in Mexico have said they won’t pay for his planned wall, “Mexico will pay for the wall”.
On the CNN debate stage, Trump retorted: “The wall just got 10 feet taller”.
Rubio, who has support from some mainstream Republican heavyweights, has shown little willingness to take on the former reality television star. That changed in the ninth GOP debate of the presidential campaign, clearly reflecting the growing sense that Trump is on track for the nomination.
Trump repeatedly stated his support for Israel, billing himself the most “pro-Israel” candidate in the GOP field.
He may well become the inevitable Republican after the Super Tuesday votes in 11 states, with 595 delegates at stake.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, also played a role in the debate.
Watching it all from the audience was former President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, whose era of politics seems long gone in today’s Republican Party.
The task is made more complicated by the shift from single-state campaigns to a new phase of the race, where the candidates must compete across several states at the same time. Biden said the GOP candidates “do not represent the view of the vast majority of the American people”.
Trump, meanwhile, sees a chance to defeats all three of his rivals in their home states: Cruz in Texas on Tuesday, Rubio in Florida on March 15, and Kasich in OH, also on March 15.
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Cruz, 45, enters the debate under pressure. “I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago”. He avoided a similar mistake in the subsequent debate, but critics will be focused on anything that suggests the 44-year-old legislator isn’t sufficiently prepared to move into the White House.
