On “Fox News Sunday” the real estate mogul lashed out at Cruz, who has taken a 10-point lead over Trump among Iowa Republicans weeks before the state’s caucuses, according to a new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll. “But, you know, the jury is out”, Carson stated.
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Trump led the pack of candidates seeking the Republican Party’s nomination in the 2016 election with 35 percent of support from Republican voters, the opinion poll released on Friday found, the same lead he held before Monday, when he said Muslim immigrants, students and other travelers should be barred from entering the country.
Citing Tashfeen Malik, the woman who with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook killed 14 people during a shooting rampage at a San Bernardino developmental center this month, Trump said the USA needs to “get its hands around the problem” of radical followers of the religion and the threat they create. “He says something completely insane and inflammatory and I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’ And then he dials back and sort of starts explaining it and saying how he would do and it makes sort of sense”.
Trump “is reminding us in that process that people are really upset and they’re really scared”, Rubio said.
Despite receiving virtual universal condemnation from politicians on both sides of the political spectrum for proposing the temporary ban – including the former vice president Cheney and the influential writer Kristol – the incident appears to be only the latest of Trump’s controversial statements to actually benefit his standing among Republican voters. “I could be at the meeting right now”, Trump said. “We’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on things”.
But while nine in 10 Republican voters said decisiveness and competence are extremely or very important in a candidate for president, just six in 10 said compassion is that important, and only half said it’s that important for a candidate to be likable. But just 31 percent said he is at least somewhat compassionate. Precisely when they offer the remainder of the Republican Party the opportunity to take the moral high ground by denouncing them. Trump is far atop the field on decisiveness.
No candidate was viewed more positively than negatively among Americans as a whole.
“If Donald Trump should decide to run as an independent the Republican Party will be in deep, deep trouble”, Luntz told “Face the Nation” moderator John Dickerson in an interview after the focus group. “I understand why they’re upset”. “Well, you know, poll numbers go up and down”, he stated.
Luntz said the only other Republican candidate who seemed to garner any interest was Texas Sen. And that’s what mattered most to Republicans surveyed in a new Associated Press-GfK poll.
“First of all we don’t need more division and everyone who’s a Muslim isn’t some terrorist, obviously”, he said.
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“They’re not distancing themselves [from me]”, Trump said of the Israeli government.
