If debates can change the course of an election, we’ll learn it soon, because Marco Rubio utterly trounced Donald Trump last night in the most commanding performance we’ve seen in the 10 GOP scuffles thus far.
I use the word “trounced” advisedly. After an hour in which Rubio turned Trump’s own game on him with quick jabs and mocking counterjabs, and Ted Cruz joined in a surprising tag-team effort with his Florida rival, Trump was actually complaining he was getting too many questions and too much time to speak.
A frustrated Trump tried to flummox Rubio by calling him a “choke artist” and referencing the senator’s bad New Hampshire confrontation with Chris Christie, but the opposite was the case. Rubio came loaded for bear. He knows that his back is against the wall, that Trump leads in almost all of the 12 states that will vote on Tuesday and that he has to alter the trajectory of the race in his favor.
“If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Tower, he’d be using illegal immigrants to do it,” Rubio said.
“Make them in America,” he said to Trump about the ties and suits that bear his brand name, which are made in China.
“You have a fake university,” he said about Trump University.
“If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now?” Rubio said. “Selling watches in Manhattan.”
Rubio said his mother was a maid in a hotel but if she’d sought a job in one of Trump’s Miami hotels, her place would have been taken by an illegal immigrant.
And that was just the first 10 minutes.
Throughout the debate, Rubio seized opportunities to hit at Trump with short, sharp and nearly unanswerable one-liners that entirely belied Christie’s characterization of him as robotic.
When Trump said he wanted to serve as a neutral negotiator in the Middle East, Rubio attacked: “The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald.” And when Trump came back by talking about his negotiating skills, Rubio asked whether he believed in negotiating with terrorists.
When Trump said his replacement plan for ObamaCare was ending “the lines between the states” preventing insurance from being sold across state borders, Rubio hit him again by demanding to know what he meant and what his plan included.
Trump repeated his talking point, and then Rubio went in for the kill, saying Trump just kept repeating himself. In a bizarre recapitulation of Rubio’s own Christie moment, Trump then repeated himself — and Rubio hit him for it.
Ted Cruz was enormously effective as well and did himself a world of good when he needed it, too — until a moment when the debate degenerated into a minute of indecipherable shouting and name-calling as he and Trump tried to talk over each other and call each other liars.
Rubio even got the best of that moment, when Trump threw a donation he made to Cruz in Cruz’s face, and Rubio piped in, “You never gave to me.”
This debate demonstrated just how destructive it was to the Republican Party that there were so many candidates crowding the stages at the earlier debates. With only five last night, the necessary battle for the nomination between the front-runner who has changed the rules of American politics and the two insurgent Republican politicians who still have a chance to catch him was finally joined.