“The last thing we need to do is to tell Israel what to do,” said Nikki Haley, who made supporting Israel her chief cause when she was Trump’s U.N. ambassador. “The only thing we should be doing is supporting them in eliminating Hamas. It is not that Israel needs America. America needs Israel. They are the tip of the spear when it comes to Islamic terrorism.”

And DeSantis said he tired of critiques of Israel’s retaliatory strikes and expanding ground invasion — which Hamas-run authorities say have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians — as he committed to helping to wipe out the Hamas “butchers” if elected.

“They would wipe every Jew off the globe if they could,” DeSantis said, adding: “I’m sick of hearing the media, I’m sick of hearing other people, blame Israel just for defending itself.”

The outlier was tech executive Vivek Ramaswamy, an isolationist who appeared to suggest that he expected Israel to eliminate Hamas on its own while the U.S. would be “smoking the terrorists on our southern border.”

The outspoken, and at times bellicose, allegiance to Israel from the mainstream Republicans contrasted with the party’s steep internal divisions over Ukraine, a staunch U.S. ally that was invaded by Russia nearly two years ago.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and U.S. Sen. Tim Scott joined Haley in portraying support for Ukraine as a way to weaken Russia — and, in Haley’s words, deter an “unholy alliance” between China, Iran and Russia.

DeSantis was more circumspect, expressing concern about the level of financial aid that the U.S. has promised Ukraine while also saying “we need to bring this war to an end” to focus on domestic priorities and border security.

Again the outlier, Ramaswamy suggested the eastern parts of Ukraine welcomed Russia’s invasion and criticized the narrative that the brutal war is a “battle between good versus evil.” It was a stance that Haley criticized as both shortsighted and dangerous.

“I am telling you, Putin and President Xi are salivating at the thought that someone like that could become president,” Haley said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A new phase

The debate played out at the dawn of a new phase of the race — and amid growing pressure on DeSantis and Haley, both jockeying for the No. 2 spot behind Trump in polls, to break out of the pack.

The two peppered each other with barbs throughout the two-hour debate, held in a glitzy downtown Miami performing arts center. Meanwhile, Ramaswamy persistently knifed Haley, including a critique of her daughter’s social media use that drew loud boos from the audience.

A disgusted Haley responded: “You’re just scum.”

If there was a key question that centered the debate, though, it was whether Wednesday’s showdown even mattered.

As his legal troubles mount, Trump has retained his hefty advantage in polling, media attention, fundraising and other traditional signs of a campaign’s strength. His Republican critics haven’t consolidated around an alternative. And the crowded field has hardly thinned, even with Iowa’s caucuses looming in January.

Trump has alternately ignored his rivals or gleefully cheered their struggles to become what he’s dubbed the “first-place loser.”

The dual tracks of the GOP nominating contest were inescapable on Wednesday, as Trump held a rally before thousands of supporters in nearby Hialeah as the five contenders scrapped, saying “nobody’s talking” about the debate about 10 miles away.

Adding to the creeping feeling of Trump’s inevitability are recent state and national polls that lend a new sense of urgency to his rivals in both parties.

A New York Times/Siena College poll showed President Joe Biden struggling in several key battlegrounds. And an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey released Wednesday indicated a deeply divided electorate that’s deadlocked over the choice for president a year ahead of the election.

And Democrats won a string of off-year election victories in Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia, where abortion rights supporters stormed the polls in a reminder of how potent that issue remains a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

DeSantis tried to lay the blame for those defeats on Trump, mocking the former president’s aggrandizing campaign trail language as he critiqued the GOP for being “caught flatfooted” on the Democratic pushback.

“He said Republicans were going to get tired of winning,” DeSantis said of Trump. “We saw last night — I’m sick of Republicans losing.”

And Haley framed Trump as a hapless arbiter of the foreign policy challenges that threaten to reshape the global order.

“He used to be right on Ukraine and foreign issues. Now he’s getting weak in the knees and trying to be friendly again,” Haley said. “I think that we’ve got to go back to the fact that we can’t live in the past.”