The evening’s tone was set early on, as the candidates who met the RNC’s requirements for continuing to debate—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, and click-addled entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—tried to one-up each other with jingoist rhetoric in support of Israel’s war in Gaza. DeSantis said that as president he’d “tell Bibi”—keen to advertise his shared bloodlust with a reminder of first-name bonhomie—to “finish the job” and wipe out “the butchers of Hamas,” adding that he was “sick of hearing the media, sick of hearing other people, blaming Israel for defending itself.” Haley, too, stressed her Netanyahu-appeasing credentials: “The first thing I told him when [the Hamas attack of October 7] happened, I said, ‘Finish them, finish them.’” She went on to point the finger at “an unholy alliance” of bad foreign actors behind the Hamas assault, meaning that “the last thing we need to do is to tell Israel what to do. The only thing we should be doing is supporting them in eliminating Hamas.”