Undeterred by a hostile audience that booed him repeatedly, Donald Trump clashed bitterly with rivals Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz at a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina ahead of next week’s primary.
“You are the single biggest liar. You’re probably worse than Jeb Bush,” Trump thundered as Cruz, the Senator from Texas who is running No: 2 in polls, questioned the billionaire businessman’s conservative credentials and his past close ties with the Clintons and other liberals over the years.
For the better part of the evening at the debate, hosted by CBS, Trump stayed focused on Bush, attacking him as well as his brother, former President George W. Bush, who is set to campaign for him on Monday.
As Trump continued with his outbursts, accusing that the Bush administration had lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) to justify the Iraq invasion, Jeb Bush kept returning the fire, deriding the Republican front-runner as one who was bent on insulting his way to the nomination.
The endless sparring and name-calling prompted another presidential hopeful, Ohio Governor John Kasich, to comment, “I think we’re fixing to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this.”
In a sideshow to the Trump offensives targeting Bush and Cruz, there was a sideshow of barbs between Cruz and Marco Rubio, the two young Cuban-American Senators, notably over their positions on illegal immigration.
After his poor showing in the last debate in New Hampshire, where he kept repeating some of his lines and attracted the charge that he was “overly scripted and robotic”, Rubio came up with a stellar performance with several pundits agreeing that he won the South Carolina debate.
Trump slammed Bush over his position on dealing with ISIS, saying it would mire the US more deeply in the Middle-East, compounding on the mistakes of his brother’s invasion of Iraq and thereby destabilising the Middle-East.
“This country’s made a lot of mistakes and the war in Iraq was one of them,” Trump told ABC’s This Week, adding, “There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no anything.”
Provoked by the attacks on his brother, Bush asserted yet again that his brother kept the US safe, only to be dismissed by Trump by asserting that 9/11, after all, happened under his brother’s watch.
When the audience cheered Bush and jeered at him time and again, Trump accused them of all being representatives of Bush’s “special interests and lobbyists”.
“Jeb is so wrong,” Trump said. “You have to knock out ISIS. .... You decide what you have to do after. You can’t fight two wars at one time,” he commented in reaction to Bush’s criticism of Trump’s policy to tie up with Russia to confront ISIS.