Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went head-to-head in the fifth GOP presidential primary debate Wednesday night, but not without taking several shots at the front-runner in the race who was absent from the matchup – former President Donald Trump.

Trump declined to attend the CNN debate in Iowa, as he has for previous debates, despite qualifying. The former president instead attended a town hall on Fox News Channel, which was also held in Des Moines, Iowa.

Haley and DeSantis were asked whether Trump has the ‘character’ to be president again.

‘I think the next president needs to have moral clarity,’ responded Haley, a former two-term South Carolina governor. ‘I think you need to have moral clarity to understand that it’s taxpayer money, not your own money. I think you need to have moral clarity to understand that when you’re dealing with dictators in the world, that we always have to fight for democracies and human rights and protecting Americans and preventing war.’

CHRIS CHRISTIE DROPS OUT OF 2024 RACE, TAKES SHOTS AT HALEY WHILE ENDING REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN 

‘So I don’t think that President Trump is the right president to go forward,’ she said. ‘I think it’s time for a new generational leader that’s going to go and make America proud again.’

‘I wish Donald Trump was up here on this stage,’ she added later. ‘He’s the one that I’m running against. He’s the one that I wish would be here. He needs to be defending his record.’

DeSantis said Trump didn’t deliver on multiple campaign promises during his presidency on issues like bringing down the national debt and border security.

‘I appreciated what President Trump did, but let’s just be honest: He said he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. He did not deliver that,’ the governor said. ‘He said he was going to drain the swamp. He did not deliver that. He said he was going to hold Hillary accountable, and he let her off the hook. He said he was going to eliminate the debt and he added $7.8 trillion to the debt. So, we need to deliver and get this stuff done.’

DeSantis later said that unlike Trump, he would have Mexico pay for a border wall as president.

‘We will build a wall,’ he said. ‘We will actually have Mexico pay for it in the way that I thought Donald Trump was. We’re going to charge fees on remittances that workers send to foreign countries. Billions of dollars will build the wall.’

‘He also promised record deportations,’ he continued. ‘Donald Trump deported fewer people than Barack Obama did when he was president. Biden has let in 8 million people just in four years. They all have to go back.’

DeSantis also hit Trump for not showing up at the debate, saying, ‘Donald Trump should be on this stage.’

‘Every candidate needs to earn your vote,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s entitled to your vote, and he comes in here every now, and then he does his spiel and then he leaves. I’ve shown up to all 99 counties because it’s important. You’re a servant of the people, you are not a ruler over people, and that’s the type of president that I will be.’

The Trump campaign dismissed the attacks when reached by Fox News Digital Wednesday evening.

‘When two losers fighting for distant second place are cat fighting in front of 10 viewers on CNN, they don’t have a leg to stand on,’ a spokesperson said.

The debate came just five days before the Iowa caucuses kick off the 2024 voting calendar.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out of the race just hours before the debate started.

Christie, one of the most vocal Trump critics in the GOP, urged voters not to support the former president during his speech announcing his campaign’s suspension at a town hall event in Windham, New Hampshire.

‘I also know though, this is the right thing for me to do. Because I want to promise you this – I am going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be President of the United States again. And that’s more important than my own personal ambitions,’ Christie said.

Former President Trump, if elected to a second term, said he would alleviate the ‘chaos’ brought to the nation by the Biden administration by securing the southern border, bringing America back to energy independence, strengthening the economy and expanding and strengthening the military.

Trump, the 2024 GOP frontrunner, participated in a Fox News Town Hall Wednesday night in Des Moines, Iowa, just days before the highly-anticipated first-in-the-nation primary contests in the Hawkeye State on Jan. 15.

Trump, who leads the Republican primary field by a massive margin, stands at or above 50% support in the latest polls in Iowa. 

The town hall was co-moderated by ‘Special Report’ chief political anchor Bret Baier and ‘The Story’ executive editor and anchor Martha MacCallum. 

Trump took questions from Iowa voters on a number of issues, but said President Biden has brought ‘chaos’ to the country.

‘They have chaos at the border. They have chaos in the military. People are going woke,’ Trump said. ‘We have chaos now. Look at today with Hunter Biden going into Congress and just sitting down and the bedlam that’s been caused today. You have chaos.’ 

Trump said the country has ‘more’ chaos with Biden than under his presidency.

‘He can’t put two sentences together and he’s representing us on nuclear weapons with Putin and Xi and all of these very smart people—the media hates when I say they’re smart, but let me tell you, they’re very smart and they’re very cunning,’ Trump said.

‘I think we had very little chaos,’ Trump said, reflecting on his administration. ‘I think most of the chaos was caused by the Democrats constantly going after me.’ 

Trump went on to point to the ‘phony Russia, Russia, Russia’ investigation; his impeachments;  and more.

‘They had the chaos. They were the ones that caused the chaos,’ Trump said. ‘We didn’t have chaos.’ 

Trump said that under his presidency, the United States saw the ‘biggest tax cuts in history’ and ‘the biggest regulation cuts in history.’ 

‘I had no wars. I’m the only president in 72 years—I didn’t have any wars,’ Trump said. 

But Trump said Biden and Democrats use the ‘narrative’ that he would bring chaos ‘because they have nothing else.’

‘The new narrative they have, as you know, is I’m going to be a dictator, because a guy like Biden, there’s nothing he can run on—everything he’s turned out, it’s turned out badly,’ Trump said.

Trump said under Biden, the border ‘is a disaster’ and ‘the worst border in history.’

‘I think the worst border in the history of the world,’ Trump said.

In Fiscal Year 2023 alone, border officials encountered nearly 2.5 million migrant encounters at the southern border–including 600,000 getaways, and 249 people on the terror watch list. 

The GOP frontrunner said that if elected, his second term would begin by ‘immediately’ terminating ‘every open borders policy of the Biden administration.’

In September, Trump announced his plans to carry out ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’ if he is elected to a second term.

Additionally, he plans to ‘invoke the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected Gang Members, drug dealers, or Cartel Members from the United States’—an effort he says will end the ‘scourge of illegal alien gang violence once and for all.’

Meanwhile, Trump was asked to respond to Biden’s claims, and to say that political violence is ‘never acceptable.’

‘Well, of course, that’s right,’ Trump said. ‘And of course, I’m the one who had very little of it. Take a look at wars again—I didn’t start—I wasn’t involved in wars. We beat the hell out of ISIS. We won 100%. We brought our troops back home.’

He added: ‘Look at the violence that we’ve had recently.’

Trump went on to say that Biden’s presidency is ‘bedlam.’

‘You have a man who can’t lead. You have a man who can’t find his way off a stage after he makes a speech that lasts for about two minutes,’ Trump said. ‘Now, I think bedlam is Joe Biden.’

Trump said Biden is using a ‘political ploy’ by claiming that he ‘wants to be a dictator.’

But as for being a ‘dictator,’ Trump joked that he would be—but only for one day.

‘I’m going to be a dictator for one day. We’re going to do two things: the border—we’re going to make it so tight, you can’t get in unless you come in legally—and the other, we’re going to drill, baby, drill,’ Trump said. ‘After that, I’m not going to be a dictator after that. I’m not going to be a dictator.’

But Trump, who said he has ‘gotten to know Washington,’ and who said ‘everybody wants to come work for us’ in a possible second term, said he was ‘not going to have time for retribution.’

‘I’m not going to have time for retribution,’ Trump said. ‘We’re going to make this country so successful again. I’m not going to have time for retribution.’ 

He added: ‘And remember this, our ultimate retribution is success…There won’t be retribution. There will be success.’

Moving onto the economy, Trump said it is ‘horrible, except the stock market’s going up.’ 

‘And I think the stock market’s got markets going up because I’m leading Biden in all of the polls– every poll, every single poll for in states that normally are not easy to lead,’ Trump said. ‘But I would say this we have a situation in which I believe the stock market goes up because I’m leading. I think if I wasn’t leading, the stock market would be 25% lower. And I think, frankly, if I didn’t win, I think the stock market would crash.’ 

Moderator Bret Baier pointed to comments Trump made this month in which he said if there is a crash of the stock market, he hoped it would be during ‘this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover.’

On Wednesday, Trump clarified, saying that he believes ‘there will be a crash if I don’t win.’ 

‘And I say that and I do not want to be Herbert Hoover. You know, Herbert Hoover was 1929. He was the president. And that was not a good time to be. I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover and I won’t be Herbert Hoover,’ Trump said. 

Trump has been criticized as a ‘big government Republican’ by his GOP opponents for adding $8 trillion to the national debt during his tenure, but he defended his record–especially during the coronavirus pandemic. 

‘I say very simply, we were starting to pay down debt,’ Trump said. ‘We were going to pay down a lot of debt when COVID came along. If I didn’t inject this country with money, you would have had a depression, the likes of which you have never seen.’

Trump continued, ‘You had to inject money. We gave businesses that were going bankrupt, temporarily bankrupt, but they needed money. We helped businesses. If I didn’t do that, you would have had a depression in this country. That was a very good investment. And now what they should be doing instead of the kind of debt that they’re building at record levels, they should be paying down their debt and they ought to go into the energy business instead of this Green New Scam business that they’re in.’

Meanwhile, as for a running mate, Trump said he’s already made his pick. 

‘I can’t tell you that really, I mean, I know who it’s going to be,’ Trump said. 

‘We’ll do another show sometime,’ Trump said when pushed by host Martha MacCallum to ‘give us a hint.’

‘What about any of the people who you’ve run against?’ MacCallum asked. ‘Would you be open to mending fences with any of them?’

‘Oh, sure. I will, I will,’ Trump responded. 

Former Ambassador Nikki Haley responded to a Trump attorney’s defense of his immunity from legal charges as president as ‘ridiculous’ during the last GOP presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses. 

‘Do you agree with the argument Donald Trump’s lawyer made in court that a president should have immunity for any conduct, including in ordering the assassination of a political rival unless that president is impeached and convicted by the Senate for that offense first?’ CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Haley during a debate on Wednesday night. 

‘No, that’s ridiculous,’ Haley responded. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous. I mean, we need to use some common sense here. You can’t go and kill a political rival and then claim, you know, immunity from a president. I think we have to start doing things that are right and you know Ron said we should have leaders that we can look up to. Well, then stop lying, because nobody’s going to want to look up to you if you’re lying.’

Haley continued, ‘But what I do think we need to look at is what has President Trump done? You look at the last few years and our country is completely divided. It’s divided over extremes. It’s divided over hatred. It’s divided over the fact that people think that if someone doesn’t agree with you that they’re bad. And now we have leaders in our country that decide who’s good and who’s bad, who’s right, and who’s wrong, that’s not what a leader does. What a leader does is they bring out the best in people and get them to see the way forward.’

The question from Tapper to Haley was in reference to a comment from Trump lawyer D. John Sauer this week in a Washington D.C. courtroom where he answered with a ‘qualified yes’ when asked if Trump’s immunity from prosecution as president would apply if Trump ‘ordered S.E.A.L. Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.’

‘He would have to be impeached and convicted,’ Sauer argued.

Sauer said, ‘There’s a political process that would have to occur under the structure of our Constitution which would require conviction and impeachment by the Senate in these exceptional cases, as the OLC memo itself points out from the Department of Justice you’d expect a speedy impeachment and conviction.’

Sauer argued before a federal appeals court Tuesday that the president has ‘absolute immunity,’ even after leaving office — an argument that the judges appeared to be skeptical of.

Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, fired back, saying: ‘I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law.’ 

But Sauer argued that Biden, ‘the current incumbent of the presidency is prosecuting his number one political opponent and his greatest electoral threat.’

Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team argued that presidents are not entitled to absolute immunity and that Trump’s alleged actions following the November 2020 election fall outside a president’s official job duties.

‘The president has a unique constitutional role but he is not above the law. Separation of powers principles, constitutional text, history, precedent and immunity doctrines all point to the conclusion that a former president enjoys no immunity from prosecution,’ prosecutor James Pearce said, adding that a case in which a former president is alleged to have sought to overturn an election ‘is not the place to recognize some novel form of immunity.’

Fox News Digital reached out to the Trump campaign for comment but did not immediately receive a response. 

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report

During the middle of the 20th century, scientists and social theorists began to fear the problem of overpopulation, predicting a period of mass starvation. 

Famously, Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, in his 1968 book, ‘The Population Bomb’ predicted ‘the battle to feed all of humanity is over…hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.’ 

At the time, his pessimistic thinking was not isolated. Simultaneously, Norman Borlaug became a pioneer in wheat production with his work in genetics powering new ways to grow crops. His ‘Green Revolution’ for which he received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, is credited with saving over a billion lives. 

Innovation, a tried and tested wire cutter, defused the population growth bomb. The same is true about the Biden administration’s pessimism-driven regulatory obsession with artificial intelligence that aims to replicate these past mistakes.

Much has been written about the innovation in the life sciences sector with new gene therapies repealing death sentences and medical devices transforming hospital-based surgeries into outpatient procedures. But little attention has been paid to the lack of innovation in health care delivery itself.

AI offers our country the potential to put health care back in the hands of the patient. 

Analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics demonstrates that private community hospitals exhibited negative labor productivity growth for over the preceding two decades, with productivity declining 5.6% in 2020. In addition to suffering from the ills of monopoly, health care is suffering the absence of a key gene at the heart of the life sciences industry: innovation.

Despite the fearmongering present in Washington, AI offers the opportunity to unleash innovation in service delivery. With many physicians spending 87% of their day bent over a keyboard, AI can function as stenographer, generating clinical notes and allowing physicians to focus on the patient in front of them.

Automation of the mundane is one of several potential patient-facing innovations. Clinical care requires split second real-time decision-making, with AI-driven technologies akin to lane departure and radar-directed cruise control in cars driving safer and more effective care.

Automation of clinical practice can also expand access while improving quality, benefitting the poorest Americans the most. The U.S. cannot train physicians and nurses fast enough to meet our needs. Upskilling and transforming how clinicians work is critical to a twenty-first century delivery system. AI is already being used to read electroencephalograms, digital cytology, and diagnose diabetic retinopathy.

Despite the true promises of the technology, Washington is focused on top-down regulations with many calling for a new independent agency to oversee artificial intelligence and digital platforms. Yet, artificial intelligence is a platform technology, not a tenet of policymaking. Flexible performance-based oversight enacted through issue-specific agencies, or in the case of health care, the FDA, offers a more pragmatic approach.

Such performance-driven policies do not require consumer-facing transparency and direct, constant consumer control. Occupants riding in a car do not decide before the moment of impact whether they desire the support of an airbag. 

Similarly, patients and physicians need to know that AI-driven technology performs as expected in a range of environments whether an integrated insulin pump and glucose monitor or clinical decision support software recommending adjustment to ventilator for an intubated patient in the operating room.

Yet, the Biden administration’s recent 804-page health technology rule undermines this objective and instead focuses too heavily on algorithmic and AI transparency in health care bypassing performance. While transparency is important, the rule is nonsensical at its core as it burdens those who would benefit most from AI with administrative burden and will ultimately stifle the use of innovative AI-driven products. 

Surgeons will not stop operating in order to read the evidence underlying AI-based technology or clinical decision support. With over 1 million new medical papers published annually, physicians and patients do not have the time to read a government-mandated research summary.

Patients and physicians instead must depend upon product performance as a policy goal. An independent network of technical standards development organizations and testing labs can support AI applications in health technology along with a light-touch oversight environment at FDA. Flexible guidance on training datasets and population representativeness, coupled with testing parameters for a variety of clinical situations can help ensure that technology development remains vibrantly decentralized and disruptive.

AI offers our country the potential to put health care back in the hands of the patient. From more time with their doctor to automated diagnosis and treatment of basic health conditions to supporting medication adherence and health behavior change, AI has enormous positive potential to provide access to low cost, high quality care.

At a time of deep political division, Americans remain unified in their dissatisfaction with our health care system. The story of Norman Borlaug offers us a timely reminder that technology-driven innovation, not Washington pessimism, must be the beating heart of our health care system’s disruption.

FIRST ON FOX: House Republicans are rolling out a ‘tool kit’ for states that they argue will help strengthen U.S. election security.

The Committee on House Administration, led by Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., is introducing the Uniform State American Confidence in Elections Act, a package of recommended legislation for states aimed at increasing voter confidence in elections.

It comes on the eve of the 2024 election cycle’s first big test: the 2024 Republican Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15.

‘I’m focused on increasing voters’ confidence and participation in our elections,’ Steil told Fox News Digital. ‘By providing a tool kit of election integrity bills to states, we are going one step further in securing our elections and increasing Americans’ confidence.’

Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., chair of the subcommittee on elections, said, ‘Americans need to feel confident that their elections are secure, which is why we have compiled crucial election integrity measures into model state legislation.’

The package is not a set of mandatory bills but rather a ‘practical framework, drawing upon successful election integrity measures implemented in various states,’ according to a one-page summary obtained by Fox News Digital.

Some of the legislative recommendations include implementing voter ID requirements, banning ballot harvesting and stopping noncitizens from voting, among others.

It would also push states to ban private dollars from being used in elections. Republicans had pushed back on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after nonprofits linked to him and his wife, Priscilla Chan, saw grant money distributed to local election offices throughout the country during the 2020 race.

Meanwhile, Democrat-run cities like Washington, D.C., and New York City have tried to pass laws to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, both of which were challenged in court.

The new bills being rolled out on Thursday are not likely to get much Democrat support. Democrats have broadly opposed GOP election security efforts, accusing Republicans of trying to make it harder to vote.

Republicans, however, have pointed to data that shows increased voter turnout in places like Georgia, which saw the number of people voting increase between 2020 and 2022 despite the state levying its own election security measures like stronger voter ID requirements for mail-in ballots and barring people from handing out food and drink to people standing in line at the ballot box.