Mother Jones
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Editor’s note: Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy recently acquired a time machine. But he didn’t go back into the past and kill baby Hitler. Instead, he traveled forward in time to Boulder, Colorado, to watch Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. Here’s his report.
No one ever accused Donald Trump of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Wednesday’s showdown in Boulder was the first debate in which billionaire real-estate mogul Trump was not the Republican front-runner. Though he still holds double-digit leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump recently dropped into second place in Iowa, and on Tuesday, after leading the GOP pack for 100 days, he trailed Ben Carson in a national poll.
But if Trump had an intention of moderating his style, it didn’t show. He stayed on the offensive throughout the night. When CNBC moderator John Harwood asked Trump if he believed Congress should raise the debt ceiling, he pivoted to attack Carson for his Seventh-day Adventist beliefs (“China has eight days”). And he raised a childhood incident in which the former pediatric neurosurgeon tried to stab a friend with a knife. Carson’s blade became caught in his friend’s belt buckle—no harm was done—and Carson has long credited the lucky break with turning his life around.
“When I stab someone, I stab them in the belly, where the flesh is softest,” Trump said. “That is how you do it. That way you can get right to their organs, and do a really tremendous amount of damage, very serious bleeding. This guy was a surgeon?”
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