Jeb Bush: Donald Trump a ‘chaos candidate’

Trump’s call for temporarily banning Muslims from the US – a proposal roundly criticized by his rivals – dominated much of the discussion heading into the debate.

Earlier, in the undercard debate of bottom four candidates, Senator Lindsey Graham too rebuked Trump for his controversial proposal to ban Muslims.

The debate was the first since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks – violence that has brought national security concerns to the fore and heightened Americans’ fears about illegal immigration and Syrian refugees.

“We’re not talking about isolation; we’re talking about security”. In the end, Jones gave his outlook on the race if those two are the ones left standing: “I think if there is a competition between these two young rising stars, not only is Cruz beating him in Iowa and beating him in the ground game, he beat him on the stage tonight”.

“Donald, you know, is great at the one-liners, but he’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president”, Bush said, adding, “He would not be the commander in chief we need to keep this country safe”.

A third-party or independent run from Trump would be a nightmare for the GOP, providing a huge boost to the Democratic nominee in the general election.

Criticism largely surrounded cuts to funding during the Obama administration. “We will stop the terrorist attacks before they occur because we will not be politically correct”.

Senator Rand Paul piled on.

Paul said that is a “recipe for disaster” and shows poor judgment.

The last was a reference to the lane-closing scandal at the George Washington Bridge in 2013, in which some of Christie’s close associates have been charged though the governor has not. Trump may fade, but it looks increasingly likely that it won’t be what the other candidates say about him that makes it happen.

Christie ignored the bridge reference.

“It’s not a war on the faith, it’s a war on a political and theocratic ideology that seeks to murder us”, he said.

In contrast, Cruz and Rubio said they understood why Trump had raised the idea of banning Muslims and avoided directly criticizing him. Marco Rubio dropped 2 percentage points.

Cruz and Rubio, both 44, battled over Cruz’s proposal to “carpet-bomb” areas of the Middle East controlled by Islamic State militants, also known as ISIS. Chris Christie was a late edition to the main GOP debate of the night after surging in the New Hampshire polls, while Ted Cruz is making gains in the Iowas polls. Rubio, who voted against the act, said Cruz was wrong to have supported it. “And that tool we lost, the metadata programme, was a valuable tool that we no longer have at our disposal”. “I don’t believe that’s Mr. Trump – and I know it’s not [Democrat] Hillary Clinton”. “The new program covers almost 100 percent”. The new program covers almost 100%.

Soon after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the NSA began secretly collecting the daily calling records – but not contents of conversations – for most Americans, including people never suspected of any crime. The extremist group claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks in Paris, and one of the shooters in California pledged allegiance to the group on Facebook shortly before she and her husband killed 14 people at a holiday party.

Cruz accused Rubio of trying to muddy the waters by minimizing differences between them.

Responding to a question about whether he’d be willing to order a strike against ISIS that could result in the deaths of innocent children, Carson pointed to his experience as a neurosurgeon.

Another eyebrow-raiser came from Huckabee, who proposed that American mosques should be surveilled to pick up signs of radicalism.