The candidates gave their opening statements, and within the first two minutes Donald Trump had launched personal insults against three other candidates — Sen. Rand Paul (on his low standing in the polls and his personal appearance), and former New York Gov. George Pataki (he wasn’t even on stage).
But when he went after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who ranks eighth in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, Walker pushed back hard.
Trump offered some numbers about Wisconsin’s budget situation that appeared to be completely made up from whole cloth, accusing Walker of running his state into the ground. “In Wisconsin,” Trump said, “you’ve lost $2.2 billion,” a sentence that doesn’t exactly indicate he knows quite what he’s talking about.
Walker was having none of it, and at one point simply remarked, pointing at Trump, “Just because he says it doesn’t make it true.” At another point, he remarked: “You want to talk about balanced budgets? You ran four projects into bankruptcy over and over an over again.”
