CNN Republican debate in Houston: news and updates

At the Republican presidential debate on Thursday, Marco Rubio came out swinging at Donald Trump with a big accusation: that Trump hired unauthorized immigrants from Poland.

“Fined $1 million for hiring Polish workers on one of his projects,” Rubio said, urging the audience to look it up on Google. “He did it. That happened.”

Marco Rubio finally landed a big hit on Donald Trump at Thursday’s Republican debate.

After getting criticized for repeating the same line at a previous debate, Rubio called out Trump for doing the exact same thing at Thursday’s event.

We’ve seen many presidential candidates suffer poor debate performances, but Twitter never has an off night.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of Vox’s favorite one-liners, put-downs, and zingers on Twitter from throughout the night:

This week, mainstream Republicans have utterly despaired over Marco Rubio’s seeming reluctance to attack Donald Trump, as the billionaire was looking more likely to run away with the nomination every day.

Rubio put a stop to that during Thursday’s debate in Houston.

Five candidates took the stage in Houston to debate whom the Republican Party should nominate for president, but only three of them really mattered and one of them — frontrunner Donald Trump — truly dominated the evening. He talked more than any of his rivals and was talked about more than any of his rivals, because the Republican Party has finally gotten serious about the idea that unless something drastic changes soon, he is likely to be the GOP nominee.

Thursday night was the first debate to feature sustained multidirectional attacks on Trump with little infighting between the non-Trump candidates. It was also the first debate in which Marco Rubio squarely defined himself as the anti-Trump, hitting him both explicitly and implicitly on both policy and personal matters.

The Republican presidential debate broke down into chaos Thursday night as the three leading candidates and debate moderator all talked over one another for about a minute and a half.

It all started when Ted Cruz reprised an attack on Donald Trump for donating to Democrats in the past. Though Cruz and Trump refrained from attacking one another during the early months of the primary, they have since turned their firepower on each other as the field has narrowed.

Marco Rubio went after Donald Trump on his strongest issue at the debate Thursday night: illegal immigration. Rubio learned the risks of a direct attack on Trump.

Rubio attacked Trump for having undocumented workers from Poland work on construction at Trump Tower in Manhattan in the 1990s. Trump has denounced illegal immigrants as “rapists” during the campaign.

The next Republican presidential debate is Thursday in Houston, Texas. It will air on CNN, and according to the network, the event will “kick off” at 8:30 pm Eastern. An online live stream will be freely available to all on CNN.com.

All five of the remaining GOP candidates — Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Ben Carson — will be in attendance. And the stakes are incredibly high, because this will be the party’s final debate before the Super Tuesday contests on March 1, in which about a quarter of the party’s delegates will be awarded to the candidates.

Donald Trump has, without a doubt, been a dominant force in the Republican debates — a pattern that will almost certainly continue with tonight’s event in Houston.

Trump always gets lots of airtime. But he also has a specific way of speaking that makes him such a compelling participant — something I figured out after I wrote a computer program to pull out every single word he’s said, so far, in debates.