Chris Christie just a few moments ago: “No, I wasn’t being held hostage.”
So many things are happening right now – mostly with the actors in question having no clear plan for what they’re doing – that it’s very hard to know where our politics will be a week from now let alone in six months. But there’s one thing we can see clearly and it’s worth noting: top Republican stakeholders are breaking a lot of china right now that will be very, very hard to unbreak. What seems most relevant to me is that almost all of this is being done with no clear sense of an end-game or even a clear plan.
9:03 PM: Feel like crowd is more Trumpy this time.
9:06 PM: Rubes: Donald did it first!!!!
9:07 PM: Seven minutes in and we’ve got dick jokes. Makes me confident Rubes physically attack before the night is out. Only question in my mind is whether Secret Service gives Rubes the protestor treatment if Rubes actually attacks.
9:10 PM: Rubio’s afraid to say “con man” in person.
9:13 PM: Trump’s ‘I haven’t started on her yet’ always gets the crowds going in a fairly gruesome way.
9:14 PM: Kasich: You keep writing me off and I keep losing and then you write me off again.
9:17 PM: I think Rubio lost the thread of that answer at some point.
And here’s the video of Donald Trump bragging that his penis is really big. Because that already happened in the first ten minutes of the debate. After the jump …
9:32 PM: I’ll say it again. Whatever Trump said, The New York Times has acted in an amazingly sleazy fashion with this Trump off the record story.
9:34 PM: I’m curious in what sense it’s a bigger punishment for Mexico if the wall is higher. Like, they’re going to say, we could live with 35 feet but 50 feet we just couldn’t ever accept that?
9:42 PM: This is reminiscent of when Megyn Kelly asked Rove on election night 2012 whether it was “just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?”
9:46 PM: “You went to Manhattan.”
9:49 PM: This debate definitely has a different feel that the last GOP debate. There’s not more attacks on Trump. But more of them are landing. They have more cudgels to use him. I’m really not sure it’ll work. But it’s different. Note that he’s getting the crowd back on his side here by embracing war crimes. That’s the deeper theme that this election is about.
9:54 PM: Ted Cruz spent “most of his life in law enforcement”? Really.
Okay, if I heard right, Ted Cruz just said he had “spent much of his life in law enforcement.” We’re trying to verify all the points in Cruz’s resume. But this is silly. It’s not clear that Ted Cruz has ever served in any law enforcement capacity at all. Cruz is basically treating being a lawyer as “being in law enforcement.” But, no. First Cruz was a law clerk. Then he was in private practice. Then for less than a year he served in the Bush DOJ – but it’s not clear to me that it was in anything that could be called a law enforcement capacity. Next he was a lawyer at the FTC. Then he was Solicitor General of Texas. Cruz was a high flying lawyer for twenty years. As near as I can tell he’s never been in law enforcement. No, being a Supreme Court clerk is not being in law enforcement.
10:12 PM: A phase here where Trump may have been ill-advised to attack and slash at Megyn Kelly for months.
10:14 PM: This is definitely the worst I’ve seen Donald Trump come off in one of these debates. But it’s such an unholy mess I’m really not clear the others are going to benefit.
10:23 PM: Notable that none of the issues in the word cloud are remotely part of any of the GOP debates.
10:35 PM: Actually, it’s not the second amendment because it’s the second in line of priority. No.
10:37 PM: If I were Trump I would have positioned Chris Christie on the stage just behind him with that “dog worrying where the bone is” look. Felt like that gave Trump an edge.
10:44 PM: I’ve always thought it’s hard for Marco Rubio to lecture Trump about not knowing anything about national security when Rubio himself has only learned any of it in the last couple years and is basically just speaking from talking points.
So here’s the part where Megyn Kelly bludgeoned Donald Trump over Trump University.
Here’s where we get the real story. We can’t afford a dangerous figure like Donald Trump, not the country or the conservative movement. But I’ll definitely back him if he’s the nominee.
Shorter GOPers: Trump is a disgrace who doesn’t share our values and may doom America and who I will be supporting in November.