Last night’s GOP presidential debate featured eight candidates, none of them named Donald Trump, but it was the former president who won the night. His aggregate lead in the national polls is titanic—he is more than 40 points ahead of the fast-fading Ron DeSantis—and nothing that happened on the debate stage in Milwaukee will change that.

Those who watched the debate will, for a few hours anyway, remember certain moments, good and bad, and take away certain impressions, positive and negative.

For my part, I thought two former governors, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, were the most impressive. Haley was particularly strong on foreign policy, lacerating Vivek Ramaswamy for his stances on Ukraine (hand it over to Russia), Israel (cut funding), and China (abandon Taiwan). “You don’t do that to friends,” the former United Nations ambassador said, attacking his stance on Israel. “What you do instead is you have the backs of your friends.” She added, “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows!” Haley also called out Republicans for promising in campaigns to cut spending and then, when in power—especially during the Trump presidency—increasing it.

[David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest]

Christie is the most skilled debater in the field, authentic and quick on his feet, and his willingness to call out Trump for his corruption and to defend former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to buckle under Trump’s pressure to steal the 2020 election stood out. So too did his moving account of the atrocities he witnessed while visiting Kyiv earlier this month. But Christie suffered the most from Trump’s absence, because he is clearly the most equipped to dismantle Trump.

I agree with my colleague David A. Graham: For the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, “the debate was his coming-out party. He was, if not definitively the winner of the debate, clearly the main character.” Ramaswamy is young, glib, shallow, and cynical—a shape-shifter and performance artist who appeals to MAGA world. He is Trump’s most reliable defender in the field; he presented himself as the heir apparent of the 77-year-old former president. After the debate, Donald Trump Jr. called Ramaswamy the “standout” performer. My hunch is that of all the candidates, he helped himself the most. Watch for his poll numbers to rise.  

Pence was something of a presence on the debate stage, at times feisty and on the attack; the problem is that he often comes across as sanctimonious. DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proved once again that he is a mediocre political talent, delivering scripted lines in a scripted manner. He has a remarkable ability to come across as a thoroughly unlikable and perennially angry human being.

For Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the debate was a lost opportunity. There was talk going into the debate that his stock was on the rise; that will end after this debate, during which he didn’t say anything memorable. And both Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum were nonfactors.

If this debate had been held late last year or earlier this year, everyone would have ganged up on DeSantis. That the other candidates for the most part ignored him underscores how much his campaign is stumbling. He’s hardly worth attacking. Among the most striking political developments this year is that Trump’s lead has continued to balloon; almost as striking is that no other candidate has become a credible challenger.

Last night’s debate also underscored that what sells in the GOP these days is a dark view of America. That has certainly been a hallmark of Trump’s rhetoric, including his “American carnage” inaugural address, which over the years has only grown more cataclysmic. But he’s not alone. The No. 2 and 3 candidates in the polls, DeSantis and Ramaswamy, share Trump’s grim view of the United States, portraying it as under siege from all sides

In an exchange with Pence, who was trying to strike a Reaganesque tone of optimism, Ramaswamy said, “Some others like you on this stage may have a ‘It’s morning in America’ speech. It’s not morning in America. We live in a dark moment, and we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war.” According to Ramaswamy, this is a time when “family, faith, patriotism, hard work have all disappeared.”

This outlook has resonance in the GOP. It’s why, if one cites positive empirical trends in America—improvements in some areas of the economy; a steep drop in violent crime and murder so far this year, according to preliminary data (in Trump’s final year in office, the homicide rate increased by nearly 30 percent); a decades-long drop in the number of abortions (which increased during the Trump presidency)—the reaction from many on the right is agitation. They have a psychological investment in a dark narrative, the view that we’re in an existential struggle, which helps justify their militancy.

[Read: Magical thinking in Milwaukee]

But perhaps the most revealing moment of last night’s debate came from Christie responding to whether he would support Trump if he was convicted of crimes. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “Someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct, okay? Now, whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States.” Christie, in response to boos from the audience, said, “You know, this is the great thing about this country: Booing is allowed, but it doesn’t change the truth.” This elicited a fresh cascade of boos; the audience became raucous, enraged that Christie would say we should stop normalizing the conduct of the most corrupt and lawless president in American history.

Tonight, Trump will be booked in Fulton County, Georgia, for his role in attempting to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential-election results. It’s his fourth indictment; he faces 91 felony counts. That’s four more indictments and 91 more felony counts than all the previous presidents in American history combined. Trump was also found liable earlier this year for sexual abuse. Yet for Republican voters, saying this conduct shouldn’t be normalized is delivering fighting words.

The reason is simple: Trump is a revered figure among the GOP base. He is also a political colossus in the Republican Party; no candidate has ever lost the nomination of his party with a polling lead like his. And after Trump is fingerprinted and weighed, and likely has a mug shot taken, at the Rice Street Jail, he is going to be viewed even more favorably by many Republicans. He is, for them, a martyred saint.

“Any time you have a pack of dogs chasing you down and you’re willing to stand firm and fight, you’re going to get my vote,” a Trump supporter who lives in Polk County, Florida, told The New York Times.

“The indictments are honestly making my support even stronger,” a 51-year-old Trump supporter from Kentucky told that paper. “They’ve weaponized our entire government against people like us. Every time he gets indicted, it’s driving tens of thousands more of us to the polls.”

These kinds of responses are what you’d expect to see in a cult, not a political party. But today’s Republican Party has become cultlike, with Donald Trump the leader. We saw that once again during the debate in Milwaukee. He was physically absent but there in spirit. This is not normal, and any country that treats it as such will, in the words of Lincoln, “die by suicide.”

One couldn’t help but pity the dutiful campaign staffers and surrogates who trickled into the spin room in Milwaukee last night. They arrived with an unenviable task: to convince reporters that their respective candidates had won the first debate of the Republican presidential primary.

To anyone who had watched, it was plain, of course, that none of the eight Republicans onstage had won in any meaningful sense. Donald Trump—facing four indictments and leading in the polls by 40 points—didn’t even bother to show up. And with many voters tuning in to the race for the first time, Trump’s rivals struggled to show they were equipped to take him down. In fact, few even tried. The former president’s name barely came up in the debate’s first hour—and when the conversation did turn to the subject of his growing rap sheet, most of the candidates defended him. All but two pledged to support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he is convicted. By the end of the evening, Trump’s path to renomination looked clearer than ever.

So how to spin this state of affairs if you work for one of the also-rans?

The answer, it turned out, was simple: Ignore it.

In multiple interviews after last night’s debate, I asked GOP campaign representatives how they planned to win the primary if their candidates were unwilling to directly confront Trump. Some offered platitudes—“This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Others gestured vaguely at plans to criticize the front-runner in the future. Most flatly refused to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s current dominance in the race. They preferred to pretend.

Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a supporter of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, scoffed when I mentioned Trump’s lead in the polls. “Go back and look at where Ted [Cruz] was in the numbers in 2016,” Roy instructed me.

“But … Cruz didn’t win the primary,” I replied, confused.

“Well, but he won Iowa!”  

Matt Gorman, a spokesperson for Senator Tim Scott’s campaign, complained that reporters and pundits were overstating the likelihood of another Trump nomination. “Too many people think it’s inevitable,” he said. But when asked how that outcome might be avoided, Gorman had only wishful thinking to offer: “We hope that [Trump] debates. That’s our hope.”

[Read: A parade of listless vessels]

It’s easy to see why, in an ideal world, Trump’s rivals would want to get him back on the debate stage. Several of the candidates managed strong moments last night. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley earned loud applause after calling out Republicans in Washington for adding trillions of dollars to the national debt: “Our kids are never going to forgive us for this.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie offered a passionate defense of former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to go along with Trump’s ploy to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021: “He deserves not grudging credit. He deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political, and unfair pressure.” And the 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy successfully made himself the evening’s main character with a rat-a-tat of Trumpian talking points, one-liners, and comic insults that aggravated his opponents as the debate wore on.

Some of the debate’s sharpest moments came when the candidates were tangling with Ramaswamy. Christie derided him as an “amateur” who “sounds like ChatGPT.” Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, snapped at him, “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.” Even Pence, who typically affects the manner of a sleepy Sunday-school teacher, seemed to repeatedly lose his cool with Ramaswamy. “Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” Pence said at one point. “We don’t need to bring in a rookie.” (This counts as a harsh burn for Pence.)

On social media and in the press room, theories abounded as to why Ramaswamy seemed to be getting under so many of his opponents’ skin. Maybe it was generational—the know-it-all Millennial with the irritating high-school-debate patter disrespecting his Boomer elders. Or maybe it was his “Ted Cruz energy”—that signature blend of arrogance and smarminess that seems calibrated to repel. Certainly it didn’t help that Ramaswamy insisted on dismissing his opponents as “super-PAC puppets.”

[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth]

But perhaps the onstage hostility had less to do with Ramaswamy than with that other blustery political neophyte who cartwheeled into GOP politics one day on a whim and promptly overshadowed the rest of the field. With Trump refusing to participate in the debates, Ramaswamy made for a serviceable proxy. (Certainly, his campaign seems to share Trump’s taste for trolling: When I asked Chris Grant, a Ramaswamy adviser, about Pence’s repeated outbursts at the candidate last night, Grant laughed and then giddily compared the former vice president to the grandpa on The Simpsons yelling at a cloud.) Still, sinking Ramaswamy—who currently polls in the high single digits—won’t meaningfully change the shape of the field. The only way to pull that off is to take votes away from the front-runner. And no one seems to have a clear plan to do that.

Back in January, I wrote about the “magical thinking” that pervaded the GOP ahead of 2024. Virtually everyone in the party I talked with—donors, strategists, elected officials—wanted to move on from Trump, but no one was willing to do anything about it. Instead, they all seemed to be waiting for the problem to resolve itself, whether via criminal charges or death or some other miraculous development. “There is a desire for deus ex machina,” one GOP consultant told me at the time. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.”

Seven months later, on a debate stage in Milwaukee, we witnessed the natural consequence of this attitude. Trump—still alive—is gliding toward his third consecutive presidential nomination while his rivals squabble with one another.

In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.

The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama.

The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans.

But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race: whether anyone can dent former President Donald Trump’s massive lead over the field. At times, it seemed as if the other candidates had lost sight of the fact that it is Trump, not the motormouthed Ramaswamy, who is 40 points or more ahead of all of them in national polls.

“Trump is the big winner,” the Republican consultant Alex Conant told me after the debate. “Nobody made an argument about why they would be a better nominee than Donald Trump. They didn’t even begin to make that argument.”

There were plausible reasons the candidates focused so little on the man they are trying to overtake. The Fox News moderators did not ask specifically about Trump’s legal troubles until an hour into the debate, instead focusing on discussions about the economy, climate change, and abortion. Ramaswamy seemed to be daring the other candidates to smack him down by repeatedly attacking not only their policies but their motivations. “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he insisted at one point. Loud booing from the audience almost anytime someone criticized Trump may also have discouraged anyone from targeting him too often.

But it was more than the debate’s immediate circumstances that explained the field’s decision to minimize direct confrontation with Trump. That choice merely extended the strategy most have followed throughout this campaign, which in turn has replicated the deferential approach most of Trump’s rivals took during the 2016 race.

[David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest]

Haley took the most direct shot at the former president on policy, criticizing him from the right for increasing the national debt so much during his tenure; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed Trump too—though not by name—for supporting lockdowns early in the pandemic. Yet these exchanges were overshadowed by the refusal of any of the contenders, apart from former Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, to object to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election or his role in sparking the January 6 insurrection. All of them except Hutchinson and Christie raised their hand to indicate they would support Trump as the GOP presidential nominee even if he is convicted of a crime before the election.

To Conant, all of this seemed reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump’s rivals seemed reluctant to attack him in the hope that he would somehow collapse on his own. “Their strategy is wrong,” Conant said. “He’s going to be the nominee unless somebody can capture the support of Republicans who are open to an alternative. And nobody even tried to do that tonight.”

David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican consultant, wasn’t as critical. But he agreed that the field displayed little urgency about its biggest imperative: dislodging from Trump some of the voters now swelling his big lead in the polls. “What this race needs is to start focusing in on [the question of] ‘Trump or the future, which is it?’” Kochel told me. “I’m not sure we saw enough of that” last night.

The failure to more directly address the elephant in the room, or what Bret Baier, a co-moderator, called “the elephant not in the room,” undoubtedly muted the debate’s potential impact on the race. Nonetheless, the evening might provide a tailwind to some of the contenders, and a headwind to others.

The consensus among Republicans I spoke with after the debate was that Haley made a more compelling impression than the other seven candidates onstage. Her best moment came when she lacerated Ramaswamy for calling to end U.S. support to Ukraine, a move she said would essentially surrender the country to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country,” she told Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.”

The debate “lifted Nikki Haley as one of the prime alternatives for the people who are worried that Trump carries too much baggage to get elected,” the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me last night. “She gutted Ramaswamay.”

Ramaswamy forced himself into the center of the conversation for much of the night, making unequivocal conservative declarations such as “The climate agenda is a hoax,” and categorical attacks on the rest of the candidates as corrupt career politicians.

Yet the evening showed why he may not advance any further than other outsider candidates in earlier GOP races, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in 2012. His choice to emulate Trump as an agent of chaos surely thrilled the GOP voters most alienated from the party leadership. But Ramaswamy’s disruptive behavior and tendency toward absolutist positions that he could not effectively defend seemed likely to lower his ultimate ceiling of support. He appeared to simultaneously deepen but narrow his potential audience.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also had a difficult night, though less by commission than omission. In his first turn on such a big stage, he simply failed to make much of an imprint; the evening underscored the limitations of his campaign message beyond his personal story of rising from poverty. “I forgot he was even there,” Kochel said. “Maybe nice guys finish last; I don’t know. He disappeared.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, was as animated as he’s been in a public forum. That was true both when he was making the case for an almost pre-Trumpian policy agenda that reprised priorities associated with Ronald Reagan and when he was defending his actions on January 6.

DeSantis, who seemed slightly overcaffeinated at the outset, didn’t disappear, but he didn’t fill Trump’s shoes as the focal point of the debate either. The other candidates devoted little effort to criticizing or contrasting with him. To Conant, that was a sign they consider him a fading ember: “No reason to risk losing a back-and-forth with a dead man,” Conant said. Others thought that although DeSantis did not stand out, he didn’t make any mistakes and may have succeeded in reminding more conservative voters why they liked him so much before his unsteady first months as a presidential candidate.

Christie in turn may have connected effectively with the relatively thin slice of GOP voters irrevocably hostile to Trump. That may constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the GOP electorate nationally, but it represents much more than that in New Hampshire, where Christie could prove formidable, Ayres told me.

But it won’t matter much which candidate slightly improved, or diminished, their position if they all remain so far behind Trump. Ayres believes materially weakening Trump in the GOP race may be beyond the capacity of any of his rivals; the only force that might bring him back within their reach, Ayres told me, is if his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election commences before the voting advances too far next year and damages his image among more Republican voters.

In a Republican context, Ayres said, “The only institutions that have the ability to bring him back to Earth are not political institutions; they are judicial institutions.”

Kochel, who attended the debate, pointed out that the loud disapproval from the crowd at any mention of Trump’s legal troubles accurately reflected the desire of most GOP voters to bury the issue. “A lot of the base right now collectively has their hands up over their ears and are going ‘La-la-la,’” Kochel said. The problem for the party, though, is that while Republican partisans may not want to deal with the electoral implications of nominating a candidate facing 91 criminal charges, “general-election voters are going to deliver a verdict on all of this even if a jury doesn’t.”

[David A. Graham: What people keep missing about Ron DeSantis]

Apart from Christie and Hutchinson, the candidates on the stage seemed no more eager than the audience to address Trump’s actions. While all of them agreed Pence did the right thing on January 6 by refusing Trump’s demands to reject the election results, none except those two and Pence himself suggested Trump did something wrong in pressuring his vice president. Nor did the others find fault in anything else Trump did to subvert the 2020 result.

The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different.

Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy made a play for top dog - here's who came out ahead.

The epigraph for the first 2024 Republican presidential debate came from Vivek Ramaswamy. “It is not morning in America. We’re living in a dark moment,” he said, midway through the melee in Milwaukee. He seemed to speak for every candidate on the stage during a dour and punchy evening on Fox News.

Ramaswamy was a fitting messenger for the mantra, because the debate was his coming out party. He was, if not definitively the winner of the debate, clearly the main character. No candidate was so eager to get in the mix on every issue, none so ready with quips, none so eager to land a blow on rivals, and none so likely to be the target of blows himself.

“Who the heck is this skinny with a funny name and what the heck is he doing on this debate stage?” Ramaswamy joked at the outset, borrowing a line from President Barack Obama. It’s a set piece that he’s unlikely to have to use again. Anyone watching the debate knows now.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Ramaswamy’s central role was that anyone other than Trump was able to claim the spotlight. The former president dominates polling in the Republican primary, but he skipped the debate, choosing instead to grant an interview to Tucker Carlson, a meeting of two men united by their grievances against Fox News. Ahead of the event, many pundits expected that Trump would manage to dominate, even in absence. But other than a single question about the former president’s felony indictments, moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum were remarkably effective at avoiding Trump’s shadow.

That was perhaps the only thing at which they were effective. The candidates, even mild-mannered ones like Pence, were able to steamroll the moderators, claiming far more time than allotted and dodging almost every question asked of them. The debate nearly featured a fascinating moment early on, when Fox played a video of a Catholic University student asking the candidates to assuage young people’s concerns about climate change. The moderators asked the candidates to raise their hands to say whether they believe humans are causing climate change. But the candidates rebelled, refusing to do so, and in the end only Ramaswamy and DeSantis gave clear answers. (They do not.)

This kind of domination of the stage and disrespect for moderators was innovative when Trump started doing it in the 2016 primary, but other Republicans have learned from him. And it was Ramaswamy, the most MAGA candidate on stage, who blew through the guidelines most. He jumped in on question after question, and reaped applause for it. He grinned broadly as rivals attacked him, and then used the response time that earned him to talk more. He openly mocked his rivals, at one point pantomiming a person testing the air by licking a finger while Governor Ron DeSantis tried to explain his position on Ukraine. “You have put down everybody on this stage,” former Ambassador Nikki Haley grumbled at one point.

This made Ramaswamy a target of many attacks, especially from former Governor Chris Christie, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Haley. Christie quipped that the last skinny guy with a funny name to stand on a debate stage was Barack Obama and said, with some reason, that Ramaswamy sounded like ChatGPT. Pence sneered that this moment was no time for “on-the-job training” for a novice like Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows,” Haley snapped.

Haley also had an unexpectedly strong performance. It’s no easy task for a former governor and ambassador to the U.N. to portray herself as an outsider, but she was quick on her feet and managed to attack the Republican establishment without falling into the DeSantis trap of veering into far-right rhetoric. She attacked rivals for voting for huge government spending increases, and blistered Pence and others for claiming they’d pass a federal abortion ban despite the barriers to that in Congress. “Be honest with the American people,” Haley said.

The big loser in all of this was DeSantis, who desperately needed to show he was still the clear second-place candidate, and failed to do so. Though he avoided adding to the gaffes that have sometimes haunted him on the campaign trail, he also added few highlights. He reached for personal anecdotes, including about his own children, and ended up sounding clinical. DeSantis also dodged question after question: He didn’t explain how he’d cut federal spending, whether he wanted a federal ban on abortion, how he’d fight crime (other than a weird aside about George Soros), or what to make of the Trump indictments.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is perpetually the subject of rumors of an impending breakout but never seems to actually break out, seemed to recede on the stage, where his affable affect and slow pace of speaking proved no match for the vitriol around him. Christie got in a few good lines, but did nothing to change the fact that his campaign is doomed, nor did Pence. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota squeaked onto the debate stage, but that won them little more than a front-row seat to the fireworks.

Watching how Ramaswamy handles his new turn in the spotlight will be interesting. He’s charismatic, a smooth orator, irreverent, and funny. But it’s easy to imagine his shtick will wear thin. Ramaswamy sounds good, but once you slow down and think about what he said, it often makes little sense or means nothing. (A recent profile by my colleague John Hendrickson showcases Ramaswamy’s problems of substance.) He also projects the air of smarmy student-government president, which means that while Ramaswamy is aiming to be the next Trump, he risks instead becoming the next Ted Cruz. But Ramaswamy’s debate performance is sure to increase speculation that he could also be the next Mike Pence—or at least take his place at Trump’s side as a vice-presidential candidate.