Mark Shields: Rubio ‘Out-Trumped Trump; He Bullied the Bully’

‘He used Trump’s tactics, got right up in his face, used mocking humor, wouldn’t let him finish a sentence, and really took Trump’s game away from Trump’

WOODRUFF:” But it certainly was at the expense of Donald Trump. Did Rubio damage Donald Trump last night with some of these very, very tough comments, Ramesh, about the fact that he inherited his money, what he did with so-called Trump University and on and on?”
PONNURU: “Maybe even more surprising than how well Donald Trump has been doing in the Republican primaries has been that he has faced almost no real resistance in the debates or in the ad war so far. And that ended last night, and I thought Senator Rubio did do a good job, and Senator Cruz did as well to a lesser extent, in pointing out all of the many vulnerabilities that Trump has on the questions of, does he really tell it like it is? Is he really on your side? The question, of course, is, is it too late?”
WOODRUFF: “And is it? What do you think?”
PONNURU: “Well, it’s the — by drowning it out with the Christie endorsement, that, I think, shows you that the Trump people thought that it was a potential problem, because it’s not as though Christie makes sense in terms of swaying voters in Alabama, Tennessee and Texas.”
SHIELDS: “No.”
PONNURU: “That is because he is at risk of suffering in the polls everywhere because of this onslaught of attacks.”
WOODRUFF: “You’re saying they did this to move the bad performance or not the strongest performance in the debate.”
PONNURU: “Yes, I think the timing of it makes the most sense.”(crosstalk)
SHIELDS: “Well, I think it was trying to change the story, no question about it. But what was interesting, Judy, was that Marco Rubio, who had been terminally nervous the last time we had seen him in New Hampshire, not South Carolina, but New Hampshire, in suffering from chronic thirstiness and all the rest of it in that debate there, came on last night, and what he did was he out-Trumped Trump. He bullied the bully. He used Trump’s tactics, got right up in his face, used mocking humor, wouldn’t let him finish a sentence, and really took Trump’s game away from Trump, and, I mean, changed himself in the process. But it does show you Trump’s game plan is seen by even his adversaries as the winning game plan, that is, the New York values, in your face. Same to you.”

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