Fox News Channel focus group members turned on GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump following the party's first debate on Thursday, calling the billionaire real estate developer "mean" and "angry."
When asked by pollster Frank Luntz after the debate how many had liked Trump before the debate began, most raised their hands. When asked how many still liked him afterward, only two or three hands remained.
"I was expecting him to do a lot better. He just crashed and burned," a man identified as Anthony told Luntz.
"He was mean. He was angry. He had no specifics. He was bombastic," another man said.
"He just let me down. I just expected him to rise to the occasion and look presidential. He didn't," added another focus group member.
"All did he was point at himself and have no solutions for anything," someone else chimed in. "I was repulsed by it."
One person said Trump was using a "divide-and-conquer strategy" that is splitting the party and will hand the election to Democrats if he doesn't get the nomination and runs third party.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer also appeared in Fox's post-election coverage, saying that Trump was "lost" for most of the debate.
"He was in a group of professional politicians, whom he mocks, and yet they as a group, individually, were able to handle it and to be sharp and persuasive most of the time," Krauthammer said. "But they left him out in the cold."
Without a chance to change to subject and "ramble on to something else," Trump was forced to stick to the questions asked, Krauthammer said.
"It was obvious that he was dodging. He was testy, he was thin-skinned," Krauthammer said.
Debate co-moderator Chris Wallace said Trump essentially had two different performances in the first and second halves of the debate.
"I thought he did quite well in the first hour," Wallace said, when he delivered zingers to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and to co-moderator Megyn Kelly.
"As the debate went on and there were a series of questions on specific issues, I thought that he faded," Wallace said. "And you could begin to see the crowd turning on him."
At one point as the crowed booed him, Trump himself noted "I don't think they like me very much."
Among the winners on Krauthammer's card were Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Among the lines liked by Luntz's focus group: when Huckabee said, "Ronald Reagan said trust but verify. President Obama is trust but villify. He trusts our enemies and villifies everyone who disagrees with him."
Focus group members, who were all Republican voters, said they didn't like the fact that Obama vilified the GOP for disagreeing with him on the Iran deal, and even compared them to the hard-line mullahs in Iran.
"I don't like the fact that my president insults my entire party because we don't agree with his deal with Iran," one man said.
They also liked Cruz's line, "We will not defeat radical Islamic terrorism so long as we have a president unwilling to utter the words radical Islamic terrorism."
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