Bush has considered backing out of pledge if nominee is Trump -aide

In Tuesday night’s Republican debate, Donald Trump was under a sustained attack by fellow candidate Jeb Bush and other presidential candidates from the GOP as they united against his plan of barring Muslims from entering the U.S.

Two polls unveiled Monday and Tuesday show Trump at new heights, with maverick US Senator Ted Cruz surging into second place and thus expected to rattle the frontrunner during the Las Vegas showdown featuring nine candidates.

Here & Now’s GOP political analyst Paris Dennard speaks with host Jeremy Hobson about the debate’s highlights and what it may mean as the candidates head into 2016.

Throughout the evening, Bush and Trump engaged in several heated exchanges, often talking over one another in an attempt to gain the upper hand. “You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families”, he said.

“Cruz shouldn’t have said that”, Burr spokeswoman Becca Glover Watkins tweeted during the debate Tuesday night. “While everyone said I beat him last night, I was only responding to his desperate attempt to stay relevant by attacking me”. Ted Cruz and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will be among the finalists going into the final stretch of the campaign.

But when it came to criticizing Donald Trump, he just didn’t go there.

There are apprehensions in some quarters that if party bosses that he will run as an independent and split the Republican base of the party bosses unfairly deny him the nomination he looks like winning fair and square.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Trump’s proposal was an offense to Muslims who serve in the USA military.

Mr Bush’s best moments all came during his multiple exchanges with Mr Trump, with the former governor portraying himself repeatedly as the grown-up in the room, while simultaneously painting the businessman, who is nicknamed the Donald, as irresponsible. That’s what Cruz asserted in the debate and Rubio called out.

His supporters, unsurprisingly, were impressed by Trump’s debate performance. Trump has maintained a sizable lead in various public opinion polls. “In fact, it will push the Muslim world, the Arab world away from us at a time when we need to reengage with them to be able to create a strategy to destroy ISIS”.

Mr Cruz and Mr Rubio clashed throughout the evening, each trying to fight on terrain they view as more advantageous. First, as Marcy Wheeler points out, Burr pretty much just confirmed that the intelligence community is “targeting “Internet phones” as well as the more limited set of call records the Section 215 phone dragnet used to incorporate, and in doing so getting closer to 100% of “calls” (which includes texting and messaging) in the United States”. “That would change when militants across the globe see that when you join ISIS you are giving up your life”.