Immigration was the ag-related topic that saw the most airtime, but it was approached through the lens of national security and refugee admission rather than through a guest worker program key to many in agriculture.
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That wasn’t exactly the case during Tuesday’s debate, as Trump’s retorts didn’t discourage Bush’s battle. Over the weekend Trump had called Cruz “a little bit of a maniac”.
Trump defended the ban, saying, “We are not talking about isolation”.
“Some people say you’re weak because you’re not loud and you’re not boisterous and you’re not rude”. “I gained great respect for the Republican leadership”. “ISIS is using the Internet better than we are using the Internet and it was our idea”, Trump said.
Most of his Republican rivals, as well as officials and leaders in the United States and around the globe, have criticized Trump’s proposal although many of his supporters have voiced sympathy with his views.
“Donald is great at the one-liners, but he’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president”, Bush said.
Jeb Bush who has been going down and down in the last few months not just took Trump head on but went on to mock him in a way that his fans never thought he was capable of doing.
“Donald, you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency”.
If you splice the numbers by when they spoke, you can see that all three were a major presence throughout the debate.
Bush said Trump’s plan was not “a serious proposal”. “He said that very simply because he has failed in this campaign; it’s been a total disaster”.
Trump’s success even as the primary elections draw closer has rattled many in the GOP establishment, who are concerned he may either win the nomination or mount a third party presidential bid.
“You know I think it’s all been about ratings and saying outrageous things and way more than half of the entire coverage the media has given to the Republican candidates has been about Donald Trump”.
“ISIS is gaining strength because the perception is that they’re winning, and President Obama fuels that perception”, Cruz said.
Cruz and Rubio also sparred over how best to combat the Islamic State. He again repeated his threat to “carpet bomb” extremists in Iraq and Syria.
“If you’re an American citizen and you join up with ISIS, we’re not going to read your Miranda rights”, Rubio replied.
But one of the most tweeted moments during the debate turned out to be a heated exchange between Trump and Bush.
But the gathering of White House hopefuls in Las Vegas shaped up as a pair of mini-match-ups: One debate unfolded between the 44-year-old senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.
Cruz said there are “millions of peaceful Muslims” in countries like India, and that we should “focus on the problem and defeat radical Islamic terrorism”. “We will stop the terrorist attacks before they occur because we will not be prisoners to political correctness”, said Cruz.
The debate suggested the GOP candidates were aware of those polls. Rubio and Carson tied at 9 percent. Ben Carson, who’s standing in polls dropped sharply after the California and Paris attacks raised questions about his foreign policy credentials, was mostly absent in the debate.
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Earlier, a pre-debate forum featured four other candidates: former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and former NY governor George Pataki.
