Trump Turned The Republican Debate Into A No-Brawl Zone
“So far, I can’t believe how civil it’s been up here,” said Donald Trump a half-hour into Thursday night’s Republican debate on CNN. And so it went for most of the evening — the tone was more subdued, if not the rhetoric. It was striking that the candidate who set that tone was the candidate who’d previously done so much to operate during previous debates without civility: Trump. Even when he’s being quiet(er), Trump controls the room.
To be sure, Trump questions dominated the proceedings: CNN knows where its ratings reside. Moderator Jake Tapper asked Trump about the protestor who was punched at one of his rallies, about his suggestion that America “take out” the families of suspected terrorists, and quoted back to the candidate Trump’s comment to CNN’s own Anderson Cooper that “Islam hates us.” Tapper asked whether Trump meant by that illiterate phrasing that “all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world hate the United States.” Trump responded, “I mean a lot of them — a lot of them.” That response got some laughs from the audience.
Speaking of audience response, Marco Rubio’s answer to how the U.S. should deal with Cuba received such loud applause, Ted Cruz had to mouth the words “I can’t hear you” to CNN’s Dana Bash when she asked Cruz the next question.
Indeed, judging purely on delivery and projection of confidence (not on the content of his answers), Rubio probably fared the best this evening. He got off the night’s most succinct punchline playing off Trump’s perennial boast that he’s not politically correct — “I’m not interested in being politically correct; I’m interested in being correct” — and gave Trump the back of his hand in asserting that people like Trump because “he says what people wish they could say. The problem is, presidents can’t just say what they want.”
In a canny case of counter-programming, ABC aired an ad during Grey’s Anatomy in support of Hillary Clinton, featuring the stars of its “TGIT” Shonda Rhimes programming, as the stars of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away With Murder, plus Rhimes, each said, “I’m with Hillary.”
By the second hour of the Republican debate, its shape had shifted. John Kasich (ever much of a force this evening) and Rubio were verbally shunted aside by the other two candidates. Cruz allied himself with Trump at the start of a sentence, saying that, based on the primary results thus far, “Donald is right: there are only two of us who have a path to the presidency, Donald and myself,” but by the end of that sentence, he leveled his Trump attack: “If you nominate Donald Trump, Hillary wins.”
In a post-debate special edition of The Kelly File, Fox News analyst Chris Stirewalt asserted that Cruz and Rubio had “abandoned the effective character attacks on Donald Trump,” and he was right: Just as Trump single-handedly lowered the volume of this night’s entire debate, so had his chief competitors capitulated to that alteration in tone.
