Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump points to the crowd while speaking at a rally on Tuesday in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
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During Thursday night’s Republican debate, Trump gave a definition for “New York values” that even Cruz was forced to applaud.
Trump is at 33 percent among national Republican primary voters, the poll found. Ted Cruz is at 20 percent; while Marco Rubio is at 13 percent. What Cruz said about NY was a “very insulting statement”, Trump concluded.
Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother.
Cruz, who has been dogged by Trump about his US citizenship status, is facing a federal court challenge in his hometown of Houston.
And yet, despite the fact that it was quite possibly the weakest-looking Trump’s ever come out of a debate tussle with another candidate thus far, he didn’t miss but a beat before pivoting to patriotism and the place where he does excel like no other: pulling heart-strings and reminding Americans of the things they fear. But none appeared to emerge with a breakout moment. Cruz spoke of “socially liberal” NY as a city obsessed with “media and money”.
Rubio likened Christie’s policies to President Barack Obama’s, particularly on guns, Planned Parenthood and education reform an attack Christie declared false. “When you’re a senator what you get to do is talk and talk and talk and no one can keep up to see if what you’re saying is accurate or not”, Christie said. “That is not consistent conservatism, that is political calculation”, Rubio concluded. Ted Cruz comes running to the city to raise millions and millions of dollars… He said it was little more than a “paperwork error”.
During Thursday’s Republican debate, Texas Sen. “It’s the people that pull the trigger”, said Trump. “It was inappropriate. And I hit him very hard”. “And I will gladly accept the mantle of anger”.
Though he lacks the formal debating prowess of Cruz, Trump’s secondary attack was more adept.
“Since September, the Constitution hasn’t changed”, Cruz added.
Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, found several opportunities to assert himself, especially on the question of immigration. “I don’t”, Bartiromo said. Christie also reprised a popular thrust he had made in earlier debates by referring to the Washington way of debating issues on the floor of the Senate, contrasting it with a governor’s obligation to actually govern. “Everybody in the world watched, and everyone in the world loved NY and loved New Yorkers”, he said.
Bush suggested the country was less safe under Obama and declared Clinton would be a “national security disaster”. The film depicts the events of the September 2012 attack on the USA consulate in Libya that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Also somewhat marginalized was John Kasich who, like Christie, barely made the statistical cut to participate on the main stage.
“I was happy to get a question this early on”, the retired neurosurgeon said with a big smile. Thursday’s session, hosted by Fox Business Network, at times was less of a debate than a forum in which the candidates turned every question into an attack on President Obama, Hillary Clinton, or both.
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Toward the end of the debate, a handful of audience members in the hall broke out into a “We want Rand” chant.
