Marco RubioMarco RubioWinners, losers in final GOP debate before Super Tuesday Trump leads post-debate online polls Cruz: Rubio would be better president than Trump MORE and Ted CruzTed CruzWinners, losers in final GOP debate before Super Tuesday Trump leads post-debate online polls Cruz: Rubio would be better president than Trump MORE threw everything they had at Donald TrumpDonald TrumpWinners, losers in final GOP debate before Super Tuesday Trump leads post-debate online polls Cruz: Rubio would be better president than Trump MORE at Thursday night’s Republican debate, hoping to find some way to stop the clear front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination.
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But Trump insisted that he would be able to achieve his goal as people would go back on their own, which he described as self-deportation.
On stage with Trump will be U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Ohio Governor John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
“Donald, relax”, Cruz said during one dispute Thursday night.
“Swing for the fences”, he said, wielding a baseball metaphor.
He was soon ignoring the debate rules and giving candidates as much time as they wanted.
“If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now, selling watches”, Rubio said. Carson at one point begged for speaking time, noting the debate rules that candidates could respond to attacks.
“I didn’t repeat myself, this is the guy who repeats himself”, Trump said, recalling a robotic Rubio performance at a debate earlier this month.
Rubio, meanwhile, rarely addressed Trump head-on prior to Thursday evening.
Trump’s case against Rubio and Cruz was that they’re both inept politicians, who either melt down under pressure or mislead voters.
Trump shot back: “I’m the only one on the stage that’s hired people. I watched him melt down on the stage like I’ve never seen anybody“.
The crowd again hollered its approval for a beaming Rubio, who piled on from there: “He says five things: Everyone is dumb, he’s going to make America great again, win, win, win, he’s rising at the polls, lines around the state”. “You gave me United States dollars 5,000”, the Texas Senator said, in another sharp exchange of words between the two.
“As soon as the audit is done, I love it”, Trump said.
“I funded you”, Trump interrupted. But even the fact of Trump’s target status confirmed his position as the central figure in the campaign, and underscored the position that Cruz and Rubio are in: scrapping desperately to be the last man left standing against him.
“While I was working on (immigration reform), Cruz said, “Donald, you were firing Dennis Rodman on ‘Celebrity Apprentice'”.
He said he would not support a ceasefire deal about to go into effect in Syria and declared that Libya would be better off had Colonel Muammar Gaddafi not been toppled from power by a U.S.-backed uprising in 2011.
Pressed on whether he would release his tax records as 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney said he should do, Trump said he would eventually do so after a “routine audit” is completed. To judge from the results of the three most recent contests, Trump won all the recent debates.
Mr Rubio appeared to accuse Trump of jumping on a bandwagon, saying: “A lot of these positions that he’s taken now are new to him”. There was some of that, of course, but the real shift was that both candidates turned their sights on Trump – even Rubio, who has barely laid a hand on the frontrunner so far.
“If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Tower”, Rubio continued, pointing out the barrier the mogul has proposed constructing along the USA border with Mexico, “he’ll be using illegal immigrants to do it”. To become the Republican party’s nominee, a candidate has to have 1,237 total state delegates.
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A quarter of the total numbers of delegates needed to secure the Republican nomination will be up for grabs.
