The sixth Republican debate on Thursday night saw all seven candidates taking a more serious tone as the first primaries approach this February.
As predicted, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — currently neck-and-neck in Iowa — tangled over a number of issues, while Rubio — third in the national polls — firebombed Cruz for his alleged flip-flopping.
Gathered below is a recap of each 2016 hopeful's top moment of the night.
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1. Donald Trump defends "New York values" — "Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan, including [National Review founder] William F. Buckley and others, just so you understand," Trump said, hitting back against Cruz's previous accusation that he embodied "New York values." "When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York . . . We rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made."
2. Ted Cruz counterpunches on Trump's birtherism — Trump has suggested in recent weeks that Cruz might be ineligible to run for president, considering he was born to an American mother living in Canada. Cruz threw a strong counterpunch: "If a soldier has a child abroad, that child is a natural-born citizen. That's why John McCain, even though he was born in Panama, was eligible to run for president. If an American missionary has a child abroad, that child is a natural-born citizen," he said. "I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa. But the facts and the law here are really quite clear. Under longstanding U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen."
He stated further that "Donald's mother was born in Scotland. She was naturalized," but said that, nonetheless, Trump is "an American, as is everybody else on this stage."
3. Marco Rubio lays into flip-flopping Cruz — "Ted Cruz, you used to say you supported doubling the number of green cards, now you say that you're against it. You used to support a 500-percent increase in the number of guest workers, now you say that you're against it. You used to support legalizing people that were here illegally, now you say you're against it. You used to say that you were in favor of birthright citizenship, now you say that you are against it," Rubio said, accusing Cruz of frequent flip-flopping. "That is not consistent conservatism, that is political calculation. When I am president, I will work consistently every single day to keep this country safe, not call Edward Snowden, as you did, a great public servant. Edward Snowden is a traitor. And if I am president and we get our hands on him, he is standing trial for treason."
4. Ben Carson jokes about his alleged sleepy demeanor — When debate moderator Maria Bartiromo asked the famed neurosurgeon about ISIS, Carson began with a joke: "Well, I'm very happy to get a question this early on. I was going to ask you to wake me up when that time came." Elsewhere in the debate, he warned his fellow Republicans to be nice to each other. "If we manage to damage ourselves, and we lose the next election, and a progressive gets in there and they get two or three Supreme Court picks, this nation is over as we know it," he said.
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5. Jeb Bush slams Obama's foreign policy, advocates "peace through strength" — "With grandiose language, the president talks about red lines and nothing to follow it up; talks about ISIS being the JV team, they form a caliphate the size of Indiana with 35 (thousand) to 40,000 battle-tested terrorists. He's missing the whole point, that America's leadership in the world is required for peace and stability," said Bush. "What we need to achieve is peace through strength, which means we need to rebuild the military."
6. Chris Christie barges into Social Security discussion with solutions — "The reason why no one wants to answer entitlements up here is because it's hard. It's a hard problem. And I'm the only one up on this stage who back in April put forward a detailed entitlement reform plan that will save over $1 trillion, save Social Security, save Medicare," said the New Jersey governor. "We have seniors out there who are scared to death because this Congress — this one that we have right now, just stole $150 billion from the Social Security retirement fund to give it to the Social Security disability fund . . . We need to reform Social Security. Mine is the only plan that saves over $1 trillion."
7. John Kasich advocates for American workers — "Many people in my family worked in steel mills," the Ohio governor said during the debate. "For too long, what happens is somebody dumps their product in our country and take our people's jobs, and then we go to an international court and it takes them like a year or two to figure out whether they were cheating us. And guess what? The worker's out of a job…I think we should be for free trade but I think fair trade. And when countries violate trade agreements or dump product in this country, we need — we need to stand up against those countries."
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