At the end of the day, the Republican primary is a contest between Trump and Anybody Else, and almost everyone on that debate stage raised their hand in support of Trump.
during the debate), it’s unclear any of these hopefuls did much to take the leader down a peg.
Trump’s absence, in some ways, allowed for a more issue-focused evening—we got talk of tax cuts and spending, Ukraine and China and the border, without the former president steamrolling anybody, as is his preferred debate tactic. But it also gave his acolytes, like DeSantis and Ramaswamy, most notably, room to do the steamrolling instead. “We’re not school children,” DeSantis said after hostsasked for a show of hands of who, among the eight candidates, believe in climate change.
Some of them sure did act like it sometimes, though. Ramaswamy cast himself as the leader of a “cold cultural civil war” and seemed the distillation of the dangerous extremism of the Trump-era GOP. DeSantis suggested he would order a military invasion in Mexico “on day one" of his presidency. AndCan’t we all just get along?
On one matter, most did: “If former President Trump is legally convicted, would you continue to endorse him as your party’s candidate?”, the former Arkansas governor, and Christie, the most viable of the anti-Trump candidates, said yes. That includes Pence, who Trump supporters wanted to hang on January 6 for declining to help him overturn his loss to, and DeSantis, who seemed to look around to see what his fellow rivals would do before raising his hand.
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