Columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that while Texas Senator Ted Cruz got a “win” over Donald Trump in their debate exchange on Cruz’s eligibility, this was a “minor” win, compared to Trump’s “electric” win in the “New York values” exchange on Thursday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel following the GOP presidential debates.

Krauthammer said, “you saw Cruz on the right, utterly speechless and essentially beaten. That was a pretty rare event. I’m surprised the focus group was looking so much at the exchange between the two of them on the birth issue. That was a win for Cruz, but I thought it was a minor one. This one, I thought, was electric.”

He added, “it’s not just that Cruz walked into a trap, knowing what was coming, having no answer, but that Trump, acted in a way that’s quite uncharacteristic. If you notice how spoke, he dropped the tone of his voice, it was serious, and he slowed down. And he delivered that in a way that was sober and serious, unlike the way he generally speaks, which is, quickly, and half sentences, jumping around, and with a lot of, sort of energy, but also — I mean, animus sometimes, I think he played that. That was the 9/11 card, and he dealt it out of the deck in a way that was surprising for Trump. I thought that was the moment of the debate.”

Krauthammer also stated, “I would say the other winner would have been, as always, as usual, [Sen. Marco] Rubio (R-FL), I would have, again, included Cruz in that because of his fluency and his strength, but that one moment, I thought detracted a lot. But Rubio, as always, had a combination of articulateness and passion, and that passion is there all the time. Some people are saying he’s getting angry, I think it’s not. It’s a kind of thing, I mean, it’s a version of the anger that trump was, if — forgive me, trumpeting, and saying this is why I’m angry, because the country’s being misrun, but the anger in Rubio is less that, it’s a sense that we could be doing this, we aren’t, and we can do it, if we realize the values that we have and see the world clearly. he’s done that in every debate, and I don’t think he stumbled once on this.”

Krauthammer concluded by saying Dr. Ben Carson and Ohio Governor John Kasich were “non-factors.” He further stated that while former Florida Governor Jeb Bush “had his best night.” It “wasn’t enough.”

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