FIVE BIG QUESTIONS AFTER A VULGAR REPUBLICAN DEBATE

[And in the days leading up the debate, a rapidly growing, increasingly prominent chorus of Republican standard bearers made that same he’s-no-Republican argument, detailing the ways in which Trump betrays conservative principles. This was a component of Mitt Romney’s message when he delivered his extraordinary speech on Thursday, telling Republicans that this was a time of reckoning and that if they don’t say no to Trump, they’re saying yes to the demise of the Republican Party and, possibly, the country.]

By Frank Bruni

Does the size of Donald Trump’s penis matter?

I’m not being cheeky. I’m not being shocking. I’m noting something that we cannot lose track of, should not shrug our shoulders about and must not gloss over: Trump has succeeded at nothing as fully as he has at infusing the presidential race with a vulgarity that’s absolutely breathtaking.

He has done so well at dragging his rivals so far down into the sewer with him that portions of what we watched on Thursday night were a fetid farce. We actually witnessed an interchange — in the first 10 minutes, no less — about how well endowed (or not) he is.

It’s worth stopping for a second, letting that sink in and wondering what it says about our country and political process right now.

Here’s how it happened: One of the moderators upbraided Marco Rubio (rightly) for abandoning incessant pledges of a positive campaign, answering Trump’s schoolyard taunts with adolescent jokes and jabs of his own, and even going so far as to claim that Trump had wet his pants under the pressure at the prior debate.

Trump butted in to take special issue with one of Rubio’s digs.

“He hit my hands,” Trump said, alluding to Rubio’s assertion that they were small and correctly noting that Rubio had insinuated that “if they’re small, something else must be small.”

Trump lifted his chin. Puffed up his chest.

“I guarantee you there’s no problem,” he said. “I guarantee.”

There is absolutely a problem, and I’m going to be careful here not to characterize it as big or small or use any adjective related to size. The problem is that Trump, Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich were on the stage in Detroit to debate their qualifications for the most powerful job in the world, at the helm of its most important democracy, and Trump and Rubio weren’t just hitting, but also dwelling, below the belt.

Surreal. Sickening.

So, yes, the size of Trump’s penis matters — or, rather, what matters is that it was an actual subject of discussion; that it reflected and set the tone of the encounter; and that this tone favors Trump, because it’s where he lives, it’s his kingdom, and if rivals join him there, they merely become his subjects.

Can Fox News be the host of every G.O.P. debate from now on?

Remember the first debate of this election cycle, when there were more than double this number of candidates and the night opened with Fox’s moderators confronting all of them, one by one, with what were seen as their greatest vulnerabilities and flaws?

The moderators were similarly merciless on Thursday night, at least when it came to Trump, and Trump was the rightful focus — the whole show. They hounded him about his inconsistencies, his lies, his lack of specificity — all of it.

If substance can pull Trump’s voters away from him, the moderators set that up to happen. If substance can prevent undecided voters from lining up behind Trump, the moderators gave them a firm nudge in the opposite direction.

And nothing about Trump’s overly defensive, excessively pouty and sometimes outright mendacious performance beckoned those voters to his side. Although there were moments when his ability to maintain his composure was heroic, there were as many or more when he grew flustered, reddened, sputtered and resorted to insult, looking tinier than I thought that a man who stands well over 6 feet

Fittingly, he reached his nadir under interrogation from Megyn Kelly, his nemesis from that first debate. The subject was fraud charges against Trump University, and every time he tried to portray them as baseless and the school and its students as the happiest place this side of Disneyland, Kelly pushed back. Confronted him with contrary evidence. Corrected his selective, self-serving version.

Her victory was clear when Trump pivoted from defending himself to pummeling Rubio, saying that if fraud was the topic, Rubio’s poor record of attendance in the Senate should be examined.

“He scammed the people of Florida,” Trump said. “He defrauded the people of Florida.”

Of no small relevance: Florida, which votes on March 15th, is a winner-take-all primary. Rubio has staked his campaign — his reputation — on winning it. But in polls there, Trump remains in the lead.

Do Trump’s voters really care how closely he hews to Republican and conservative orthodoxy?

Cruz and Rubio keep making this assumption. They made it anew on Thursday night.

Once again and at great length, Cruz recited the list of liberal Democrats to whom Trump had contributed over the years, dwelling in particular on how many checks he’d written to Hillary Clinton and asking an excellent question: How would Trump be able to campaign effectively against someone whom he’d supported and demonstrated such excitement about in the past?

Rubio denounced Trump as someone “whose positions are not conservative.” He mentioned Trump’s defense of Planned Parenthood. He disparaged Trump’s commitment to national defense.

And in the days leading up the debate, a rapidly growing, increasingly prominent chorus of Republican standard bearers made that same he’s-no-Republican argument, detailing the ways in which Trump betrays conservative principles. This was a component of Mitt Romney’s message when he delivered his extraordinary speech on Thursday, telling Republicans that this was a time of reckoning and that if they don’t say no to Trump, they’re saying yes to the demise of the Republican Party and, possibly, the country.

But here’s the problem: Trump’s voters aren’t with him because he’s the purest conservative. Trump is their protest vote, and part of what they’re protesting is preoccupations of the Republican Party that haven’t improved or been immediately relevant to their lives. They’re protesting foreign wars, free trade and the coddling of corporations, and some of Trump’s apostasies are precisely what draw them to him.

Republican leaders’ failure to take down Trump isn’t simply a function of hesitancy — it’s not just about waiting too long. It’s about their own lack of credibility and authority with the part of the electorate that’s defying them.

Is it now officially three against one?

One of the most fascinating dynamics of the debate was the degree to which Cruz, Rubio and Kasich declined to go after one another, no longer angling to emerge as the single Trump alternative but working harder instead to erode Trump’s support, no matter where that support went.

In debates past, Cruz and Rubio were at each other’s throats. On Thursday night, they were practically arm in arm, tag-teaming Trump.

This supported the notion that none of Trump’s rivals maintains much hope anymore of exceeding his delegate count; what they’re banking on is the ability to gather enough delegates between them, and to hold Trump’s tally in check, so that he finishes with a plurality but not a majority and the nominee is decided at the convention.

Could some good yet come of Trump’s place in the race?

I’m going to play Pollyanna, minus the long blond hair and the bow, and remark on a refreshing development over the last few weeks and especially days. More emphatically and unequivocally than at any recent juncture that I can recall, Republican leaders and standard bearers are saying that their party has no tolerance for any racism, no room for any sexism, no forgiveness for bigotry.

There have always been Republicans, many of them, who felt this way passionately, but they often spoke in muffled voices or chose to keep silent. There were racist, sexist, bigoted voters whom they were all too happy to have. A party needs to reach the 50-percent mark to win elections, and it makes ugly deals and unseemly compromises to cross that threshold.

But disgust with Trump and a recognition of the damage that he could do have prompted many of the Republican Party’s stewards to make unwavering statements and articulate principles that they’ll be judged by — and maybe even have to live up to — down the line.

Trump has reconnected them with their soul or rather, if you want to be a cynic, forced them to find one.

Maybe the detour down his pants will amount to something more and better, in the end, than phallic braggadocio.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on Facebook.

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