White House hopefuls Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio unleashed a barrage of attacks against Donald Trump during Thursday’s raucous Republican debate as they sought to halt the billionaire frontrunner’s seemingly relentless march to the party’s nomination.
The three candidates exchanged some of the most heated and acerbic remarks of the entire 2016 primary cycle. They often talked over one another as they battled for supremacy in the final on-stage showdown before the “Super Tuesday” series of state wide votes on March 1.
Cruz and Rubio mounted a furious assault against Trump, blasting the frontrunner for hiring foreigners and challenging his commitment to conservative principles, but Trump largely stood his ground and swatted away the attacks.
Knowing that they need to change the campaign trail narrative quickly or risk Trump coasting to the Republican nomination, the two freshman senators launched broadsides against the brash billionaire, who lashed out at his challengers in what quickly devolved into a shouting match.
Rubio, seen by many as the primary mainstream challenger, appeared loose and aggressive against Trump. While he has hesitated to attack Trump directly on the campaign trail, Rubio seemed eager to engage and criticize his rival during the debate in Houston.
He immediately berated Trump over his immigration positions including having once supported a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. And he took him to task for having “hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled” in Trump development projects.
Rubio pointed to articles that described a 1980s lawsuit by a workers union against Trump for hiring 200 illegal immigrants from Poland to build the Trump Tower in New York.
Rubio also accused Trump of starting a “fake university” that bilked students out of thousands of dollars, and said that if the real estate icon had not received a massive inheritance from his wealthy father he would be “selling watches in Manhattan.”
Trump pushed back fiercely.
“I’ve hired tens of thousands of people,” he said in his rejoinder to Rubio. “You haven’t hired one person, you liar.”
