Debate and rally split screen gave viewers sharp contrast between Trump and GOP rivals

MIAMI — It turns out viewers Wednesday night were treated to a debate of sorts between former President Donald Trump and five Republican White House rivals.

The GOP elephants were not on the same stage, but the split-screen competition between a Republican presidential debate in downtown Miami and Trump's rally in Hialeah delivered a sharp contrast in style and substance among Trump, the leading candidate by far, and the trailing challengers still grasping hope of surpassing him.

The debate featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, ex-U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and three others delivered spirited and detailed discussion and disputes on topics ranging from the number of U.S. Navy warships necessary for America's national defense, the proper age for Social Security retirement given lengthening life expectancy and the number of weeks in a pregnancy before termination is banned.

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About a dozen miles away, Trump spoke at a high school football stadium in Hialeah where his address was quintessentially thick in vitriol and thin on details. The former president promised the "largest deportation" effort in U.S. history without offering specifics while rattling off grievances and damning his political opponents, calling them everything from radical leftists, communists, Marxists and "cheating dogs."

His rally warm-up acts, which included vilified comedian Roseanne Barr, prompted chants of "bull----" and other R-rated language. The most vulgar comment to come from the five GOP contenders was when Haley referred to entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as "scum" after he brought up Haley's adult daughter as someone who uses TikTok.

As for Trump, his "message" hasn't wavered.

"No matter how hateful or corrupt the communists and criminals we're fighting against may be, you must never forget this nation does not belong to them," Trump said. "This nation belongs to you. It belongs to the people with us tonight."

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In Miami, the GOP candidates delved into the policy weeds

In Miami, the candidates sparred for more than two hours on a broad range of issues, from banning access to TikTok to disagreeing on military aid to Ukraine to supporting a broad energy policy based on domestic production.

On the latter, Haley jousted with DeSantis, questioning the Florida governor's commitment to oil and gas drilling, and particularly the use of fracking, in Florida. "You were, you always have been, just own it if that's the case, but don't keep saying you're something that you're not," Haley said, saying DeSantis was flip-flopping on support for fracking.

DeSantis shot back that under his plan "we are absolutely gonna frack," but "I don't think it's a good idea to drill in the Florida Everglades and I think most Floridians agree with me."

DeSantis and Haley also took aim at Trump.

Asked right off the bat to explain why he was a better candidate than the former president, DeSantis said, "Donald Trump is a different guy than he was in 2016." He noted Trump's absence from the debate stage, his failure to explain why he didn't make "Mexico pay for the wall," his "racked up debt" and, he noted, he kept losing elections.

Haley said Trump was the perfect president at the time he was first elected in 2016, but "I don't think he is the right president now."

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Trump will spend the next year trying to stay out of prison and that he can't lead the country through the immense challenges facing it. U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina departed from MAGA dystopian views and referenced former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln.

"We have to get back to being the nation that is, in fact, the city on a hill," he said.

At Trump rally, the operative words were 'deep state' and 'bull----'

Across town in Hialeah, where city officials announced they have proposed naming a street after him, Trump was extolling his single term in the White House.

In Trump's telling, his administration delivered the "largest tax cut" in U.S. history and, if he wins a second term, will "drill, baby, drill," and sell the oil, which he called "liquid gold," to Europe and Asia at quantities large enough to pay off the country's $34 trillion debt and still cut taxes again. The former president did not explain or offer details on how all that would be done.

"A lot of people say, 'You're conservative.' It's not a question of being conservative," Trump said. "We're people with common sense."

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Before Trump arrived on stage, Barr, Donald Trump Jr. and his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, stoked the crowd with animated speeches that were, at times, spiked with profanities.

"Hell is coming for those people," said Guilfoyle, predicting a Trump victory next year will lead to a "reckoning" and a "house cleaning" of the deep state.

Trump Jr. took particular aim at "RINOs," or "Republicans in name only." He lambasted deep state "bull----," at one point holding up a microphone for the crowd to chant the vulgar term.

"We need to save our country because it's not going to save itself," he said.

Barr held up a jacket depicting Trump as a matador facing off against a bull. Barr ended her short speech with a shrieking scream calling on Trump, the "MAGAdor-in-Chief," to "end the bull----" and kill the "goddamn deep state."

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The deep state references alluded to a conspiracy belief, widely embraced by the Trump base, that government entities and bureaucracies thwarted his agenda during his one term. Though it's never been concretely defined, the deep state overlaps with what Trump and others have repeatedly referred to as the "swamp." During the Trump presidency, deep state talk merged with the QAnon fringe conspiracy theory in which believers insisted that a figure embedded within the deep state would ultimately bring its own downfall.

The sharpest contrast emanating from Trump's rally speeches across Iowa, New Hampshire and South Florida, however, may be between the 2019 and 2023 versions of Trump himself.

The pre-pandemic version of the then-president took to Twitter to post missives that, as his daughter Ivanka has said, communicated in a way that was "not to everyone's taste." But the average voter is likely to recall, as Trump is apt to boast, that his administration's policies delivered a strong economy and some groundbreaking foreign policy initiatives.

The 2023 version of Trump offers a much more dystopian and despising vision where war on an amorphous set of enemies takes up much of his focus, attention and time.

Trump talks about a "police state" that is persecuting Catholics and Christians across the United States and a "sick political class" that wants to turn America into "communist Cuba." On immigration, he warned that "what's coming" across the border are Hannibal Lecters, a reference to the insane serial killer in the 1991 film "Silence of the Lambs" as Trump claims other countries "empty" their prisons and "insane asylums."

"This country is going to hell," Trump said.

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Regardless of how 'tasteful' or not the rhetoric, polls show Republicans favoring Trump by wide margins

Nonetheless, a slew of polls since the summer suggest that 2023 Trump is overwhelmingly favored by GOP voters.

A day before the candidates took the stage in Miami, a survey poll of Florida Republicans by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab showed Trump with a commanding 39-point lead. Some 60% of those asked chose the former president, with DeSantis trailing at 21%, followed by Haley at 6%.

Days before, other polls revealed some alarming trends, not just for Trump's Republican rivals but for President Joe Biden and Democrats.

A New York Times and Siena College poll released Sunday showed Trump ahead of Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. On Saturday, a voter survey released by CBS News and YouGov showed only 18% of respondents saying they would be financially better off if Biden won, versus 45% who said the same about a Trump victory. And while just 31% said they believed a Biden win would improve prospects for global peace and stability, 47% said the same about a Trump triumph.

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For that reason, Wesley Borucki, associate professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University, said Trump was "right to stay out" of the debate frays.

"These debates, when you have so many people on stage, it's hard to really articulate your views fully," he said. "With Trump being up by, what, 40 to 50 points in the polls, there's no reason for him to appear on stage and make himself the target of people who are just asterisks at this point."

In particular, Borucki criticized the debate invite extended to Christie, who Borucki said has a singular mission to attack Trump while polling in the single digits. Besides, Borucki added, Trump is a known candidate.

"Everybody knows where Trump stands," he said.

Susan MacManus, professor emerita at the University of South Florida, cautioned against reading too much into all the polls. Yes, she said, the surveys have "got to be frightening Democrats" but Trump also has high unfavorable ratings and a slew of legal pitfalls going into 2024.

She reiterated past observations that all polls suggest Americans do not want to see a Biden-Trump Round 2 next year. And she cautions the "primary cycle" could belie the polls for two reasons.

"One, the primary cycle itself fields different demographics and can create momentum for someone. And secondly, they have to be driven by the fact that Trump still has the potential for running into some legal problems," she said.

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Unclear whether GOP debate or Trump rally drew more viewers, but Lincoln Project watched both

In fact, a year after their expected midterm "red wave" fizzled, national Republicans were handed a set of disappointing and bitterly surprising results in Tuesday's off-year elections.

In Virginia, Democratic candidates held on to the state Senate and flipped the House, dealing a blow to GOP rising star Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In Ohio, voters approved a ballot item protecting the right to an abortion, with the Biden campaign noting it is the seventh state since 2022 where voters have supported reproductive rights.

In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was re-elected. In Pennsylvania, voters elected Democrat Daniel McCaffery to the state's high court. All this followed Florida Democrat Donna Deegan's victory in the Jacksonville mayoral election six months ago.

On Wednesday, the Biden campaign boasted that after winning the 2020 election with the most votes ever (at 81 million), Biden and Democrats have kept the momentum going through 2022 midterms and now the off-year elections.

"Just three years later, President Biden now presides over the best midterm & off-year combo for a president’s party in 20 years," the campaign said in a statement.

Leaders of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project said they planned to repeat the 2022 successes next year.

Founded in 2019 with the goal of defeating Trump politically, the organization of "Never Trumpers" and others plans to be active in six to nine competitive and swing states to deny Trump the ballots needed to get to 270 electoral votes. Founders Reed Galen and Rick Wilson said their ads through Election Day 2024 will stress Trump's threat to democracy and use his own words against him.

"It will be about democracy. It will be about personal liberty," Wilson said. The organization will also highlight how a second Trump administration will "actively take over the reins of justice in this country and use it politically," Galen added.

"He's telling you what they are going to do," said Galen. "When they say they will go after the administrative state, it's all the stuff that makes government work. And they'll get rid of that. How many times do we have to see this? If you have any sense of history, you know how this turns out."

On Wednesday night, Galen and Wilson watched both the GOP debate and Trump's rally, mining both events for material to feature in their biting commercials, although Wilson said their archives are already well stocked with fodder for 2024.

"Our staff monitors all this stuff," said Wilson. "All of it adds up. You have no idea how much video we have right now."

Reed explained that central to understanding Trump is to realize that he projects. "Whatever he says the other guys are doing wrong, that's what he's guilty of," he said.

Trump insists the opposite, claiming that "we have to get back" to the White House "to bring sanity" to governance in America.

"We are not the ones endangering American democracy," Trump said. "We're the ones saving American democracy."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: GOP debate in Miami, Trump Hialeah rally offer a sharp contrast