Prediction: It’s a Cruz-Rubio fight in 2016

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has won the fifth presidential debate in Las Vegas.

The debate exposed a fundamental divide among the Republicans gathered on the stage of a hotel about what role the USA should play in the world.

Bush said temporarily halting Muslim immigration would be counterproductive in the fight against ISIS because it would push Muslim allies away from America “at a time when we need to re-engage with them to be able to create a strategy to destroy ISIS“. Rand Paul’s resistance to get a more involved in conflicts overseas. “From regime change you have chaos”.

The comments being considered stem from one of a more heated exchanges during the debate between Senator Cruz and his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator Marco Rubio, over the contentious National Security Agency program of a bulk data monitoring and retention.

The most aggressive in challenging Trump was a newly energized Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, and brother of former President George W. Bush.

“I won’t get my information from the shows”, said Bush, who questioned whether Trump was getting his information from Sunday morning news shows or Saturday morning cartoons.

After promising not to leave the party, now Trump’s calling for unity.

“Donald is great at the one-liners”, he went on. “Leadership is not about attacking people and disparaging people”.

Trump was dismissive of Bush’s blows during and after the debate, saying his opponent was only trying to pull up his numbers and chalked it up as simply a political tactic.

“Jeb doesn’t really believe I’m unhinged”, Trump said. “Lots of talk about surveilling churches, closing state borders to us”.

So rather than talking any more about the “chaos candidate”, maybe this is the Bush moment we should be praising. “And we’ve opened up a very big discussion that needed to be opened up”, Trump said.

Trump further scoffed at Bush for spending millions on campaign ads despite being so low in the polls.

Ultimately, Cruz was proved right, when the Intelligence Committee retracted its statements and said, “The Committee is not investigating anything said during last night’s Republican Presidential debate”, in a statement by Burr, and Vice Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, reports CNN.

“You’re moving further and further”, Trump said to Bush. “Pretty soon you’re going to be off the end”.

Trump was largely spared from criticism by Cruz and Rubio, who said they understood why he had raised the idea of banning Muslims.

Trump was named the debate’s victor by 34.8 percent of the 1,059 likely Republican primary voters who responded to the poll for Independent Journal.

Donald Trump doesn’t like having to be mean to Jeb Bush.

Rubio pointed to the fact that Cruz has backed quintupling the number of visas in the controversial H-1B program, which encourages legal immigration for highly skilled foreign workers.

“You can’t carpet bomb ISIS if you don’t have planes or bombs to attack them with”, he said. Most of the candidates held their fire when it came to Trump, despite his 27-point lead in a recent national Monmouth University poll.

Whether Ted Cruz had spoken about things he should not have, was the topic of much debate.

Cruz has been reluctant to criticize Trump, and while Trump called Cruz “a maniac” at the weekend, he passed up the chance to do it again. “So it’s not as clear as just reading what he said”.

With Cruz running neck and neck with Trump in Iowa and several candidates trying to make a move in New Hampshire, the stakes for this debate may have been the highest yet.

Sen. Marco Rubio and Ben Carson followed at 9 percent apiece of the #GOPDebate conversation.

And former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina blasted “first-term senators who’ve never made an executive decision in their life”.