CNN Republican debate in Las Vegas: News and updates

Midway through the GOP debate Tuesday night, Republican poll leader Donald Trump offered a blunt and brutal denunciation of the last Republican president’s main foreign policy initiative — the Iraq War.

Indeed, Trump went further even than most Democratic politicians would, calling the war “a tremendous disservice to humanity” — and added that it achieved nothing whatsoever, except to leave the Middle East “a total and complete mess.” Here’s what he said:

An hour and a half into the fifth debate of the 2016 Republican presidential primary, America — or at least that very small sliver of America that really cares about policy differences between presidential candidates — got the fight it had been anticipating for months: Ted Cruz taking on Marco Rubio on immigration.

It was inevitably going to happen at some point. Cruz and Rubio are arguably the two most serious candidates in the field — which is to say, of the candidates who actually have policy arguments during presidential debates, they’re the two doing best in the polls. And while they agree with each other on many issues, and the distinctions between them on others (like intervention in Syria) are nuanced, immigration is the issue where Rubio’s record distinguishes him from Cruz and from a lot of Republican primary voters.

You’ve probably heard the hoary old tale of the boiling frog. A frog is put into a pot of pleasant warm water, and then the water’s temperature is increased. The temperature goes up little by little, and so gradually, that the frog doesn’t even notice — until eventually the water boils and it’s cooked to death.

The story is a total myth. Frogs don’t really act this way. If subjected to this painful treatment, they actually jump out of the water to try to save themselves.

In a two-plus hour Republican presidential debate focused on “keeping America safe,” candidates mentioned guns just once — when Jeb Bush said, “America is under the gun to lead the free world, to protect our civilized way of life.”

But guns are one of the biggest security threats to Americans. The research strongly indicates that America’s easy access and abundance of firearms contributed to the deaths of nearly 34,000 people in 2013, including more than 11,200 due to homicides. (Terrorism killed fewer than 75 Americans annually between 2002 and 2011.)

Tuesday night’s Republican debate technically had nine candidates onstage. But when you run the numbers, it’s clear that three men dominated the event: Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.

Unsurprisingly, these are also the candidates leading the polls — and they essentially treated the CNN/Facebook debate as one all about them.

Tuesday night’s CNN Republican debate was perhaps the most entertaining installment since the first Fox News debate in August. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush’s weird personal issues with each other went from subtext to explicit, brutal text. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz went at it over the 2013 immigration battle. Ben Carson compared bombing Syria to removing a brain tumor from a small child.

We won’t know who “really” won until poll results trickle in. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped.

If Donald Trump hadn’t been leading national GOP polls for months, one could be forgiven for seeing him as a loser in the Republican debate in Las Vegas. The main policy ideas he articulated were either nonsensical (shutting down “areas” of the internet) or morally abhorrent (killing the relatives of terrorists). He didn’t talk that much, he chewed up a lot of his time in a petty personal feud with Jeb Bush, he displayed a lack of knowledge of “nuclear triad” jargon, and he deviated from key elements of Republican Party ideology. But it’s December now. We saw the Summer of Trump turn into the Autumn of Trump, and in the latest polls Trump’s overall lead was higher than ever. Everything that’s powered his rise was still intact throughout the debate, and nothing happened to stop his momentum.

Most strikingly of all, his main rivals for the nomination didn’t even try to stop him. As conservative pundit Matt Continetti put it, “The Republican candidates won’t attack Trump because they genuinely do not understand him or his meteoric rise to the stratosphere of American politics. They’re afraid of the consequences — are they misjudging the moment? Do they need his supporters? Will they be missing a witty comeback when Trump insults them mercilessly?”

For someone who follows US foreign policy, Tuesday night’s GOP debate was almost physically painful to watch. This tweet, from New York Times Magazine contributor Ana Marie Cox, perfectly summarizes why:

In other words: The debate was more than two hours of scary rhetoric and fearmongering, with pitifully little policy substance to back it up.

During Tuesday night’s Republican debate, Wolf Blitzer asked former neurosurgeon Ben Carson how he would deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Carson began by talking about how North Korea’s over-spending on its military has contributed to its extreme poverty — which is indeed true — but then pivoted to an awfully strange point about Russia and Putin and oil sales and Europe. It is a bit difficult to parse:

Two weeks ago, Carson foreign policy adviser Duane Clarridge told the New York Times that “nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.” It doesn’t seem like the Asia prep sessions went any better.

But Trump was not having it. In a fiery retort, Trump pointed out what’s perhaps the most uncomfortable fact for the Republican Party: He actually rose to the top while insulting people. In fact, Trump’s insults and bluster have arguably pushed Bush down.

“I’m at 42, and you’re at 3,” Trump said, referring to national poll numbers. “So far I’m doing better.” He added, alluding to Bush’s position on the stage, which is based on polling, “You started off over here, Jeb. You’re moving over further and further. Pretty soon you’re going to be off the end.”

To be clear — this is totally incoherent. The term “carpet bombing” means mass unguided bombing in populated areas; that is not what happened in the Gulf War. Moreover, in the Gulf War the United States was fighting an actual military as opposed to a terrorist group pretending to be a government. ISIS has adapted to the US military campaign in a way that forces us to limit strikes if we don’t want significant civilian casualties.

Blitzer, to his credit, followed up on this point. He asked Cruz whether he would — as his “carpet bombing” phrase implied — support mass bombing of ISIS-held cities. Cruz just couldn’t answer the question:

Fiorina clearly meant “bitch,” or perhaps “bossy” — in any case, a gendered insult. The comment, and indeed her entire opening statement, was heavily focused on the ways she has struggled to overcome specifically gender-based obstacles to get to the top.

In discussing her struggles and challenges, Fiorina led off with very gendered ones: “I have been tested. I have beaten breast cancer. I have buried a child.”

During Tuesday night’s GOP debate, Donald Trump proposed an unusual strategy for fighting ISIS: banning “areas” of the internet “where we are at war with somebody.” It got odder from there.

Here is his exchange with host Wolf Blitzer, which began after Blitzer asked Trump if he wanted to close off parts of the internet:

Early in Tuesday night’s GOP debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Donald Trump to defend his proposal to ban all non-American Muslims from entering the United States. Trump’s answer was, even for Donald Trump, pretty strange:

ISIS phones! So to be clear, Trump’s argument for keeping out Muslims was:

This debate (the fifth for the GOP) will feature nine candidates on the primetime stage. Just five of those nine managed to qualify by topping 3.5 percent in an average of national polls — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Jeb Bush. However, CNN also took polling averages in Iowa and New Hampshire into account, so Chris Christie, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, and Rand Paul also made the cut (though CNN had to bend its rules a bit to get Paul in).

Four other candidates — Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum, and George Pataki — will be relegated to the earlier undercard debate. The other GOP candidate still running, Jim Gilmore, failed to qualify.

Expect the stage to (still) be quite crowded. Nine candidates have qualified for the primetime debate segment: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, and Rand Paul. And the undercard will feature Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum, and George Pataki.

However, increasingly, a top tier of candidates has emerged in national polls. First, there’s Trump, who remains in first place, as he has been for five months. Different pollsters have differed on exactly how big the billionaire’s lead is — one recent poll put him just five points up, and another showed him with an astonishing 27-point lead. But it does seem clear that Trump’s recent call to ban Muslims from entering the US — which will surely be discussed at the debate — hasn’t hurt him among the GOP electorate so far.

Tuesday night’s CNN debate in Las Vegas will feature two veteran television journalists and one conservative radio host as moderators. Meet Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash, and Hugh Hewitt.

If you’ve watched CNN at all during major news events of the past 25 years, you are familiar with Wolf Blitzer and his signature white hair with matching beard. Blitzer joined the network in 1990, played an integral role in its coverage of the Persian Gulf War, and from there swiftly became a cable news star. Currently he anchors The Situation Room and a daytime show called Wolf; his coverage mostly focuses on US politics with a special interest on Middle Eastern affairs.

Though every other presidential candidate has at least said that he or she “disagrees” with Trump’s approach, Republicans have varied in how far they’re willing to go in distancing themselves from Trump. And plenty of Republican candidates have advocated policies that would be anti-Muslim in effect, even if they stopped short of a blanket ban.

So where does each of the candidates stand? We compiled the statements they’ve made in one handy chart.

Winning an election is often about getting your supporters to turn out, rather than trying to change people’s minds. So strategists want to get voters thinking about the election early and often.

That’s why this new poll released Monday from the Pew Research Center might offer hope to Republicans:

It is not an understatement to say that Black Lives Matter and criminal justice issues are dominating the national conversation. Over the past year, police killings like those of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner have gotten a lot of attention from the media and the public, while criminal justice reform looks like one of the few issues that could actually make it through a dysfunctional Congress.

But in the Democratic and Republican debates, issues like police brutality and prison reform have gotten barely any attention from the moderators or candidates. For example, the big question in the first Democratic debate was about slogans (“black lives matter” versus “all lives matter”). And the Republican debates have seldom brought up the issue at all — usually tossing a question to one or two candidates, while other issues are put to the entire field and have room to flourish into an actual discussion.