Republicans have met an alpha male and he might just uncuck them.
Liberal Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent gets it! He writes:
Republicans have already surrendered to Trump: they have mostly given up on trying to resist the terms of the debate as he has set them, and have mostly accepted that the battle will be fought on his turf.
Two major exchanges from last night’s debate drive this home. The first came when a moderator asked the candidates to say whether they agreed with Trump’s call for a temporary ban on non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States.
John Kasich kinda sorta broke with Trump a bit, saying in an aside that “we don’t want to put everybody in the same category,” and Chris Christie did flatly say that “you can’t just ban all Muslims,” but both men seemed more eager to flaunt their toughness towards Syrian refugees. Rubio and Cruz answered the question mainly by blaming the very existence of Trump’s proposal on Obama’s weakness…
This is not what was supposed to happen. For months, the chatter in media and political circles held that at some point, one or more of Trump’s rivals would rise up and confront his simplistic xenophobia and demagoguery with the force of a real argument, which would remind everyone that Trumpism is not what the GOP is really about. This just hasn’t happened in any meaningful sense. And there is no sign that it is going to. As Jonathan Chait puts it, a strange defeatism about Trumpism has taken hold among Republicans.
The second key moment came towards the end, when Cruz and Rubio engaged in an epic showdown over immigration. Rubio made his now-familiar argument that it’s disingenuous of Cruz to attack him as soft on amnesty because Cruz once supported legalization. Cruz dismissed that, pointing out that the two have fundamentally differed, and continue to do so, on the core question in the debate: whether or not to legalize the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country.
Cruz is right about this. But the important point here is that Rubio did not seriously defend the idea of legalization. Instead he claimed the entire immigration debate has been recast by events — that it’s no longer about whether to legalize the undocumented but instead is about the ways radical jihadists are trying to exploit the immigration system. “This issue has to be now more than anything else about keeping America safe,” Rubio said.
It’s hard not to read this as a partial surrender to Trump’s emotional framing of the issue, i.e., that migrants are primarily a cause for suspicion and fear. This, from the GOP’s onetime Great Latino Hope, the candidate who took an enormous risk by embracing the idea that those who are here illegally, but want to work and generally contribute lawfully to their new American communities, should be given a chance to transition from the shadows into public participation in American life. Now the immigration debate is no longer about the broad, complex questions of fairness and justice that are at the core of whether the undocumented should be given that chance. Instead, the debate is over what to do about the notion that immigration risks admitting sinister threats into the country.
Trump set the terms of this debate at least six months ago. And that has not changed. Perhaps as the nominee Rubio might be able to pivot back to supporting some form of legalization and even citizenship, something he has left the door ajar to doing later. But the battle for the nomination itself looks likely to unfold largely within the parameters of the debate as Trump has established them.
