Republican debate breaks TV record thanks to Trump

“She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions”, Trump said in an interview on CNN Friday night. It’s got Jeb! Bush not knowing when the primaries are, Rand Paul and Chris Christie slap-fighting like schoolchildren, Donald Trump calling every lady in America a “fat pig”, and so on.

Through the course of the debate, Trump was on the receiving end of zingers.

“I learned long ago that the most effective way to compete is to play your own game, and I’ve been competing with men my whole life”, she said.

“I think he took out a gun and shot his campaign in the head”, said Florida Republican strategist Rick Wilson.

Before her move into the evening lineup, Kelly and her representatives had talks with other TV outlets, including ABC, as Brian Stelter reported at the time. After the debate, Trump said Kelly “behaved very nasty to me”.

His tweets took aim at Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer, who said the Thursday night debate revealed Trump to be “testy” and “thin-skinned”.

The emergence of Mr. Trump, whose colorful if acerbic style has earned him pole position in the Republican campaign, created a broader interest in this debate than just hard-core political junkies.

One factor driving the seeming acceptance of such insults is who’s making it. Even if in a political environment, most are seen as entertainers, including Trump.

The debate averaged 24 million viewers and 7.9 million in the key demographic of adults ages 25 to 54, the one advertisers look at when buying time on news programs, according to Nielsen.

Trump as president seems like a ridiculous, if not frightening notion, unfortunately the alternatives for the Republican candidacy do not appear to be much better. He also criticized moderator “Fox News Sunday” host as being only a “tiny fraction” as good as his dad Mike Wallace, and there was “blood pouring out of his eyes, too”. Ironically, by being aggressive journalists instead of ideological lackeys, the Fox News team gave the Republican Party a big boost, which, of course, is the objective for which the Fox news channel exists.

“I don’t think they like me very much”, he said of the debate audience.

Former Hewlett Packard CEO and GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is not allowing fellow Republican candidate and businessman Donald Trump to steal her momentum. They have George Will, who is the dour George Will. He has nothing good to ever say about me. Trump then phoned in to “Fox & Friends” to say that he felt fine taking the stage with the other nine GOP candidates, until Kelly nailed him with “that really tough question”. But the questions to me were not nice. He also sent a note to New York Times columnist Gail Collins with the words “Face of a Dog” written across her picture.

But for all the attention on Trump, Bush said Friday the criticism lobbed at him by Democrats shows he is the candidate they fear most.

In mid-July Murdoch called the GOP frontrunner “embarrassing”.

Cohen told POLITICO that he does not believe the tweet implied any sort of physical violence but did not back down from his beef with Kelly.

Ailes, however, threw cold water on that report. A combination of quick wit (notably, a Trump diss), specific plans, and clear talking points.