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.”

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.