Trump was center of attention and attacks in GOP debate
David Fahrenhold
Billionaire Donald Trump entered Thursday night’s GOP debate as the race’s front-runner — but he spent much of the night on the defensive, struggling to explain his positions to skeptical moderators, arguing with his rivals, even trying to drown out their arguments with shouted insults.
“I won 10 states,” Trump said at one point, reasserting his dominance on a night when it seemed to be under assault. “I am by far the leader!”
Throughout the debate, both Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) returned to the furious attacks they had mounted on Trump a week before. Rubio, as before, assailed Trump with an eye toward moderate voters — asserting, again and again, that he was an unserious con man who was simply telling them what they wanted to hear. Cruz made a different pitch: Aiming at conservatives, he repeatedly sought to assert that Trump was a closet liberal, who had donated and befriended conservative enemies like Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Trump replied, as before, that he was beating them both. Which he is. With the anti-Trump vote still split between Cruz, Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, it will be hard for a single challenger to pass Trump.
“Millions and millions of people have come to the Republican Party in the last little while,” Trump said at the debate’s end.
Thursday’s debate came at a crucial point in this entirely unexpected GOP primary season.
Trump dominated the primaries of Super Tuesday this week, and now he has a significant lead over his top rival, Cruz, in the race for Republican convention delegates.
But in a divided field, Trump has still won less than half of all the delegates awarded so far. That leaves his opponents with a viable — but risky and destructive — strategy. The only way to stop Trump from winning the nomination may be to stop anyone from winning it: dividing up the delegates so that no one has a majority, forcing a brokered convention.
The next states to vote will be Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maine, all on Saturday. After that, the next primaries will be Tuesday, when Republicans vote in Hawaii, Mississippi, Idaho and Michigan, which is why Thursday’s debate was in Detroit.
The debate reflected the degree to which Trump has changed the GOP’s discourse – at one point, he made an unprompted joke about his own genitals — but also the degree to which the other candidates have mimicked his style. Cruz often treated Trump like a child with a temper tantrum, urging him to “breathe” with mock concern. Rubio repeatedly interrupted Trump, as Trump had interrupted others, saying, “False. False,” as Trump tried to make a point.
Kasich, as he did in the last debate, did not participate in the attacks on Trump. Instead, he seemed to be holding his own private event at the side of the stage, ignoring the fighting next to him and trying to speak directly to voters.
At the end of the debate, all four candidates onstage refused to break the last taboo of a party debate. The other three said they would vote for Trump, if he became the GOP nominee. Trump said he would vote for one of them, if the nominee turned out to be somebody else — a vow he has made, and then reconsidered before.
But first, Trump mocked the idea that he might have to face the choice at all.
“Even if it’s not me?” he asked, as if the idea were something he hadn’t thought of before.
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