Expect a good old fashioned brawl when the Republican candidates debate

The World
Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party takes part in his first Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons.

Republican presidential candidates are getting ready to enter the ring tonight — not to box of course, but sometimes it feels that way.

They're gathering for a televised debate.  It's supposed be a civilized political debate. But all bets are off about how civil it will be as the rivals are expected to gang-up on the front-runner, billionaire Donald Trump, who brings bomb-throwing rhetoric with him.

Some media critics say the televised debates are becoming more about entertainment than political dialogue.

“Well it's certainly been promoted as a boxing match,” says BBC political reporter Anthony Zurcher, pointing to the CNN television commercials that “make the debate look like the next heavy weight championship bout. The only thing that they're missing right now is an announcer shouting ‘let's get ready to rumble!’”

In addition, the candidates will be moved closer to each other on stage than they were at the last debate, so “they’re infringing on their personal space a bit,” he says. 

Debate moderator Jake Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, will be reading out quotes from the different candidates, slams and insults that they’ve said about each other. “So everything is being set up to try to encourage as much political brawling as possible,” says Zurcher.

Plus it’s likely the majority of that combative spirit will be focussed on Trump. It’s as if the leading Republican presidential candidate has a big target on his back.

“I think you’re going to hear a lot more heated attacks than you did the first time around. The candidates now realize that Trump isn’t going to fold on his own. They have to try to bring him down a notch. If you listen to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, he said recently that he's going to try to expose Trump as a fake conservative and that he was going to go after the New Yorker with both barrels.

“So maybe it’s not so much a boxing match we should be talking about here, but an impending gun fight.”

Zurcher predicts “the trend of coarse and over-the-top, political debate is not going to go away anytime soon. Donald Trump has shown that it works. He's a proven master of social media. He’s on Twitter all the time and social media has only increased and amplified the rhetoric as the biggest slams and insults get a kind of resonance. So it seems this is a brave new world for American politics and it’s not going to be for the timid.”

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