Republican debate on Fox Business: news and updates

The inspiration for Donald Trump’s immigration policy, as Donald Trump himself has proudly told plenty of interviewers (and the moderators of last night’s Fox Business presidential debate), is “Operation Wetback.”

Trump didn’t use the term in last night’s debate. But that’s what he was referring to:

The Fox Business Network Republican debate lacked a signature moment, a single key winner, or really anything that should dramatically alter the trajectory of the race. That meant, de facto, good news for Marco Rubio, who was on the rise before the debate happened. Not so much because he was so impressive, but because across a kaleidoscopic series of exchanges in which we saw the most actual debating of any debate thus far, Rubio time and again was the guy defending the banal Republican Party view of the issues.

Other candidates — from John Kasich to Donald Trump to Jeb Bush — all had their good moments, but they often arrived while saying something ideologically heterodox, impressing some observers in the press but not necessarily appealing to the people who determine a Republican Party primary.

In a shocking moment even for him, Donald Trump snapped at Carly Fiorina at Tuesday night’s GOP debate for “interrupting everybody.”

Trump’s remark seemed to come out of nowhere. The candidates had been interrupting one another and heatedly debating all night.

Tuesday night’s Fox Business Republican debate didn’t provide the drama and excitement that the first Fox News debate and the CNBC debate two weeks ago offered, but it was hardly dull. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul battled on foreign policy, Paul and Donald Trump clashed on trade, and the decline of Jeb Bush continued in typically pathetic form.

It’ll take a few days for poll results to trickle in, which will provide the closest thing to an objective answer of who actually won the debate. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped.

“I love free trade,” Donald Trump said at the Fox Business Republican presidential debate Tuesday night. “I’m a free trader, 100 percent!”

But judging by Trump’s public record, nothing could be further from the truth. In his 2011 book, Time to Get Tough, Trump called for a 20 percent tariff on all imports:

After a lengthy exchange in which Donald Trump rambled about how China will take advantage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Sen. Rand Paul did some on-the-spot fact-checking at the Republican debate tonight, pointing out that China is not a part of the trade deal and may, in fact, lose because of it.

Here’s the exchange, which began after moderator Gerard Baker asked Trump about TPP:

Here’s a tip for presidential candidates: When you say during a debate that you want to get rid of a certain number of government agencies, make sure you can name them all. Rick Perry famously messed that up during his presidential campaign back in 2011 — naming just two of his promised three agencies and finishing lamely with, “Oops.”

Now, during Tuesday’s Republican debate, his fellow Texan Ted Cruz made a similar mistake — he named five agencies, but could only come up with four. (He repeated the Department of Commerce twice.)

In Tuesday night’s Republican debate, Rand Paul argued that a root cause of growing inequality in America is the Federal Reserve and its policy of low interest rates.

“By artificially keeping interest rates below the market rate, average ordinary citizens have a tough time earning interest,” Paul said. “As the Federal Reserve destroys the value of the currency, what you’re finding is that if you’re poor, if you make $20,000 a year and you have three or four kids and you’re trying to get by, as your prices rise, these are the people hurt the worst.”

Within minutes of the Fox Business Republican presidential debate starting, frontrunner Donald Trump committed a classic Kinsley gaffe: accidentally saying what he actually meant. When asked if he supports an increase in the minimum wage, Trump explained his opposition by saying that high wages make the US uncompetitive: “Taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world.”

Naturally, Democrats seized on the idea that wages are currently “too high,” given how sclerotic median wage growth has been over the past few decades:

Early in the Fox Business Network debate, Marco Rubio took a strong stand in favor of vocational education. “For the life of me I don’t know why we stigmatize vocational education,” he said. “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders than philosophers.”

As a former philosophy major, I thought I would look into this a little bit. We don’t have good data on the earnings of philosophers, per se, but we can look at the life cycle earnings of people who major in philosophy or religious studies:

At the GOP undercard debate, the candidates were asked to offer their views of the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy. Not surprisingly, everyone who spoke took a dim view of President Obama’s choice for the job, Janet Yellen. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered his criticism in a way that was both particularly pointed and strikingly self-contradictory, arguing that the Fed is simultaneously doing the wrong thing for the economy and helping Obama politically:

Christie is doing a good job here of channeling the views of many Wall Street types who live in New Jersey and enjoy complaining about the Fed.

The fourth Republican debate will air at 9 pm Eastern tonight on the Fox Business Network. But don’t worry, if you don’t have cable, you can still tune in — Fox Business will generously post an online livestream available at this link. This is in contrast to the last GOP debate hosted by CNBC, which had a livestream restricted to people with cable accounts.

An earlier undercard debate took place at 7 pm Eastern, featuring Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Santorum. Huckabee and Christie were be in the undercard for the first time after failing to meet the polling cutoff for the primetime event. And usual undercard participants Lindsey Graham and George Pataki were dropped for failing to reach 1 percent in any of the four most recent national polls — they joined Jim Gilmore in no-man’s-land.

Grab a friend, choose a card, and play along.

The next Republican presidential debate is today at 9 pm Eastern. It will take place in Milwaukee and be aired on the Fox Business Network. An earlier undercard debate, with candidates who aren’t polling as well, began at 7 pm Eastern. A free live stream will be available to all at this link on FoxBusiness.com.

This debate (the fourth for the GOP) will have the fewest candidates onstage yet. Fox set semi-arbitrary polling criteria for inclusion and decided to interpret them very strictly, even though some candidates would end up dropped.

The moderators for Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate on Fox Business Network are Maria Bartiromo, Neil Cavuto, and Gerard Baker. The former two are anchors on Fox Business, and Baker is the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal. Overall, they should provide a much more reliably conservative outlook than was seen in the CNBC debate.

Maria Bartiromo is 48 years old, married, and probably best known for her 20 years of work on CNBC — a business news channel that’s considerably more prestigious and higher-rated than Fox Business. At CNBC she hosted a variety of shows including On the Money, Closing Bell, Market Wrap, and Business Center. She was known informally by the nickname “Money Honey” because the business news audience is gross and because when she started out, she was the only woman reporting live from the New York Stock Exchange. Later she embraced the nickname and even trademarked it, with an eye toward using it on “kids’ TV and books ... school supplies, DVDs, mouse pads, jigsaw puzzles, dolls, and backpacks, among other items.”

Jeb Bush’s presidential run is going so badly that people don’t even know if he’s running.

At least that’s what the Google data says: With the fourth Republican debate tonight, the top Googled question about Bush is whether he’s still running for president.

In the 2016 cycle, the Republican Party has had a remarkable surplus of presidential candidates, making it difficult for Republican elites to unite behind an alternative to amateurs Ben Carson and this guy. One effect of the number of candidates has been to distort Republican debates, with 10 or 11 candidates competing for scraps of time in the main event and “happy hour” debates for the rest of the candidates.

I have previously surveyed possible reasons for the large number of candidates, but I have a guess as to why so many candidates have run: debates. Politicians and the Republican Party learned the lessons of the 2012 cycle too well, resulting in a surplus of candidates for a limited number of debates.