DETROIT (AP) – Donald Trump replied to a dig from Republican presidential rival Marco Rubio about his sexual prowess with a crude sexual reference of his own at Thursday night’s GOP debate.
In the early moments of the first debate since Super Tuesday, the GOP front-runner noted that the Florida senator had mocked the size of his hands. “And you know what they say about men with small hands,” Rubio told a mostly college-aged audience at Roanoke College in Virginia last weekend.
Said Trump at the debate: “He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this. Look at those hands. Are they small hands?”
Holding them up to laughter among the crowd at the debate in Detroit, he continued: “If they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.”
It was a new level of nasty in a Republican campaign that’s become increasingly coarse in the past few weeks, as Trump has begun to emerge as the clear front-runner.