For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.

[Read: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open]

With just hours to go, however, the speaker abruptly changed course, defying his conservative tormentors and partnering with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The House this afternoon overwhelmingly approved a temporary extension of federal funding. If the Senate approves the House legislation tonight, as it is expected to, the deal will put off a shutdown for at least 45 days and buy both parties more time to negotiate spending for the next fiscal year.

The question now is whether McCarthy’s pivot will end his nine-month tenure as speaker. By folding—for now—on the shutdown fight, he is effectively daring Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and other hard-line Republicans to make good on their threats to depose him. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters before the vote. “But I think this country is too important.”

The stopgap bill includes disaster-relief money sought by both parties, but McCarthy refused to add $6 billion in Ukraine aid that the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority of senators wanted. The Senate had been on the verge of passing its own extension that included the Ukraine money, but after the House vote it was expected to accept McCarthy’s proposal instead. Whether House Republicans agree to include Ukraine assistance in the next major spending bill is unclear, but Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are likely to make an aggressive push for it.

McCarthy’s surprising about-face set off a wild few hours in the Capitol. Democrats were caught off guard and stalled for time to read the new bill, unsure if Republicans were trying to sneak conservative policy priorities into the legislation without anyone noticing. (In the end, only a single Democrat voted against it.) Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a second-term Democrat, caused the evacuation of an entire House office building when he pulled a fire alarm just before the vote, in what Republicans said was a deliberate—and possibly criminal—effort to delay the proceedings. (Bowman’s chief of staff said that the representative “did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote. The Congressman regrets any confusion.”)

[Annie Lowrey: How to end government shutdowns, forever]

On the right, the criticism of McCarthy was predictable and immediate. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” one of his Republican opponents, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted after the vote, seemingly rhetorically. Yet to more moderate Republicans, the speaker’s decision was a long time coming. McCarthy’s months-long kowtowing to the right had frustrated more pragmatic and politically vulnerable House Republicans, a few of whom threatened to join Democratic efforts to avert, or end, a shutdown. But many Republicans are even more furious at Gaetz and his allies. “Why live in fear of these guys? If they want to have the fight, have the fight,” former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate who served in the House with McCarthy for 12 years, told me. “I don’t understand why you would appease people who are doing nothing but trying to hurt and humiliate you.”

This morning, the speaker finally came to the same conclusion. His move to relent on a shutdown only kicks the stalemate over federal spending to another day. Now it’s up to House Republicans to decide if McCarthy gets to stick around to resolve it.

On the brink of a federal government shutdown, Republican minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy dropped demands for steep spending cuts.

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.

That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents) were divided on the laws’ legality. And now they’re going to the Supreme Court.

On Friday, the Court announced it would be putting these cases on its docket. The resulting decisions could be profound: “This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet,” Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor at Lawfare, told me. At stake are tricky questions about how the First Amendment should apply in an age of giant, powerful social-media platforms. Right now, these platforms have the right to moderate the posts that appear on them; they can, for instance, ban someone for hate speech at their own discretion. Restricting their ability to pull down posts would cause, as Rozenshtein put it, “a mess.” The decisions could reshape online expression as we currently know it.

[Read: Is this the beginning of the end of the internet?]

Whether or not these particular laws are struck down is not what’s actually important here, Rozenshtein argues. “What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.” Whatever they decide will set legal precedents for how we think about free speech when so much of our lives take place on the web. Rozenshtein and I caught up on the phone to discuss why these cases are so interesting—and why the decision might not fall cleanly along political lines.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How did we get here?

Alan Rozenshtein: If you ask the companies and digital-civil-society folks, we got here because the crazy MAGA Republicans need something to do with their days, and they don’t have any actual policy proposals. So they just engage in culture-war politics, and they have fastened on Silicon Valley social-media companies as the latest boogeyman. If you ask conservatives, they’re going to say, “Big Tech is running amok. The liberals have been warning us about unchecked corporate power for years, and maybe they had a point.” This really came to a head when, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, major social-media platforms threw Donald Trump, the president of the United States, off of their platforms.

Nyce: Based on what we know about the Court, do we have any theories about how they’re going to rule?

Rozenshtein: I do think it is very likely that the Texas law will be struck down. It is very broad and almost impossible to implement. But I think there will be some votes to uphold the Florida law. There may be votes from the conservatives, especially Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, but you might also get some support from some folks on the left, in particular Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor—not because they believe conservatives are being discriminated against, but because they themselves have a lot of skepticism of private power and big companies.

But what’s actually important is not whether these laws are struck down or not. What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.

Nyce: What are the important things for Americans to consider at this moment?

Rozenshtein: This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet.

The Supreme Court in 1997 issued a very famous case called Reno v. ACLU. And this was a constitutional case about what was called the Communications Decency Act. This was a law that purported to impose criminal penalties on internet companies and platforms that transmitted indecent content to minors. So this is part of the big internet-pornography scare of the mid-’90s. The Court said this violates the First Amendment because to comply with this law, platforms are going to have to censor massive, massive, massive amounts of information. And that’s really bad. And Reno v. ACLU has always been considered the kind of Magna Carta of internet–First Amendment cases, because it recognized the First Amendment is really foundational and really important. The Court has recognized this in various forms since then. But, in the intervening almost 30 years, it’s never squarely taken on a case that deals with First Amendment issues on the internet so, so profoundly.

Even if the Court strikes these laws down, if it does not also issue very strong language about how platforms can moderate—that the moderation decisions of platforms are almost per se outside the reach of government regulation under the First Amendment—this will not be the end of this. Whether it’s Texas or Florida or some blue state that has its own concerns about content moderation of progressive causes, we will continue to see laws like this.

This is just the beginning of a new phase in American history where, rightly, it is recognized that because these platforms are so important, they should be the subject of government regulation. For the next decade, we’ll be dealing with all sorts of court challenges. And I think this is as it should be. This is the age of Big Tech. This is not the end of the conversation about the First Amendment, the internet, and government regulation over big platforms. It’s actually the beginning of the conversation.

Nyce: This could really influence the way that Americans experience social media.

Rozenshtein: Oh, it absolutely could, in very unpredictable ways. If you believe the state governments, they’re fighting for internet freedom, for the freedom of users to be able to use these platforms, even if users express unfriendly or unfashionable views. But if you listen to the platforms and most of the tech-policy and digital-civil-society crowd, they’re the ones fighting for internet freedom, because they think that the companies have a First Amendment right to decide what’s on the platforms, and that the platforms only function because companies aggressively moderate.

Even if the conservative states are arguing in good faith, this could backfire catastrophically. Because if you limit what companies can do to take down harmful or toxic content, you’re not going to end up with a freer speech environment. You’re going to end up with a mess.

Republican candidate Nikki Halley calls for "lucidity" tests for US politicians over 75 to check they are mentally competent enough to be in office.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died last night at 90, braved one of the most remarkable political expeditions in American history—and also one of the grimmer spectacles at the end of her life and career.

Is it too soon to point this out? Yes, perhaps. With the official notice of her death today, Feinstein received her just and proper tributes, hitting all the key markers: How Di-Fi, as she is known in Washington shorthand, had stepped in as mayor of San Francisco after her predecessor was assassinated in 1978. How she was a fervent proponent of gun safety, the longest-serving woman in the Senate, and the chamber’s oldest member. How, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she presided over the preparation of an incriminating report describing the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists in secret prisons around the world. How she was a trailblazer, stateswoman, powerhouse, force, grande dame, etc. Give her her due. She deserves it.

But Congress can be a tough and ghoulish place, with its zero-sum math and unforgiving partisanship. Over her last year, Feinstein’s declining health became a bleak sideshow—her absences and hospitalizations, shingles, encephalitis, and bad falls; the lawsuits over her late husband’s estate and the cost of her medical bills and long-term care.

Feinstein’s insistence on remaining in the Senate—and the uncertainty of her schedule—complicated life for Democrats, making it harder for them to hold votes, set strategy, and confirm judges. Her colleagues and White House officials whispered their frustration. And she became the latest exemplar of a basic, egalitarian principle in lawmaking: Even the most legendary figures ultimately amount to a vote. Often your most important job is simply to be available, show up, be counted.

[Franklin Foer: Dianne Feinstein and the cult of indispensability]

When that is in doubt, patience can wear fast. Questions about “fitness” arise. Such is the price of continued residency in the senior center of the Capitol. Feinstein resisted quitting for years, and only grudgingly said she wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, leaving the race to succeed her in a kind of morbid suspension.

Politics, of course, runs on its own schedules and follows its own rules. A few weeks ago, I asked Adam Schiff, one of the California House Democrats running to succeed Feinstein in the Senate, whether she should step down. In other words, was she fit to serve? Again, maybe this was harsh, but it had become a standard question around Washington and California, and perfectly germane, given the tight split in the Senate. “It’s her decision to make,” Schiff said, a classic duck, but also practical. “I would be very concerned,” he continued, “that the Republicans would not fill her seat on the Judiciary Committee, and that would be the end of Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.” (Politico reported today that Republican Whip John Thune, of South Dakota, said he expects that his party will not resist efforts to fill committee seats left vacant by Feinstein’s death.)

Schiff added that he had continued to have a productive working relationship with Feinstein’s office, despite her health struggles. He was a proponent of business as usual, for as long it lasted, and Feinstein was still there. The pageant continued, the government heading for another shutdown, House Republicans tripping toward an impeachment and over themselves.

In the hours after Feinstein’s death was announced, Washington took a brief and deferential pause. Statements and obituaries were dispatched, most prepared in advance. Then it was on to the next. Who would California Governor Gavin Newsom pick to serve out Feinstein’s term? How would that affect the race to succeed her next year? Who would replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, and when would they be seated?

[Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?]

The hushed questions about how long the nonagenarian senator could hang on finally had their resolution. Far too many people in power resist the option of a restful denouement. The stakes can be high, even harrowing, for the country. These sagas can be distressing to follow, but there’s no shortage of dark fascination. Stick around too long, and you risk losing control of the finale. It can happen to the best, and at the end of the most extraordinary careers.

Today’s Republican Party has made a turn toward foreign-policy isolationism or, less pejoratively, realism and restraint. After Donald Trump shattered the GOP’s omertà about the disastrous Iraq War—a “big fat mistake,” he called it in 2016—Republicans quickly learned to decry “endless wars” and, often quite sensibly, argue for shrinking America’s global military footprint. During the 2020 election, Trump’s supporters touted his refusal to start any new wars while in office (though he got very close).

When it comes to America’s southern neighbor, however, Republicans have grown more hawkish. Party leaders, including members of Congress and presidential candidates, now regularly advocate for direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico to attack drug cartels manufacturing the deadly fentanyl flooding into America. “Building the wall is not enough,” Vivek Ramaswamy said at Wednesday night’s GOP-primary debate. The best defense is now a good offense.

The strategic stupidity of any potential U.S. military intervention in Mexico is difficult to overstate. The calls for such an intervention are also deeply ironic: Even as Trump’s epigones inveigh against the possibility of an “endless war” in Ukraine similar to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are reprising the arguments, tools, and rhetoric of the global War on Terror that many of them belatedly turned against.

The War on Terror was a disaster, devastating countries and leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions of refugees adrift. A botched U.S. attack on Mexico, America’s largest trading partner, could create a failed state on the 2,000-mile U.S. southern border, an outcome that would be far, far worse for the United States. The toll of the U.S. fentanyl epidemic is staggering: More than 100,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2022. But a unilateral military “solution” holds the potential, if not the near certainty, of causing far more death and destruction than any drug.

[Read: ‘Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber’]

Trump, not surprisingly, sowed the seeds for this new jingoism. After launching his presidential campaign in 2015 with an infamous verbal attack against Mexican migrants, in office he mused about shooting missiles at Mexican fentanyl labs, according to the memoir of his then–defense secretary, Mark Esper. “No one would know it was us,” Trump assured a stunned Esper.

Fast-forward to last month, at this election cycle’s first Republican presidential debate: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to launch Special Operations raids into Mexico on his first day in office. His rivals for the nomination have issued similar promises to wage war against the cartels—in the form of drone strikes, blockades, and military raids. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley breezily promised at this week’s debate to “send in our Special Operations” to Mexico. Republican senators and representatives have introduced bills to classify fentanyl as a chemical weapon, designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and authorize the use of military force in Mexico.

If you’re inclined to dismiss this saber-rattling as primary-season bluster, don’t be so sure. Pundits and voters seem to be falling in line behind the politicians. The conservative commentator Ben Domenech recently said that he is “close to becoming a single issue voter” on the issue of attacking Mexico (he’s for it). A recent poll found that as many GOP voters consider Mexico an enemy of the United States as an ally, a marked shift from just a few years ago.

The parallels to the War on Terror aren’t exact—no prominent Republican has advocated a full-scale invasion and occupation of Mexico, at least not yet. But the rhetorical similarities are hard to ignore. America’s tragic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began with politicians inflating threats; seeking to militarize complex international problems; and promising clean, swift, decisive military victories. The language regarding Mexico today is eerily similar. The Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld recently assured his viewers that a unilateral attack on Mexico would “be over in minutes.” The labeling of Mexican cartel leaders as “terrorists” sidelines even the most basic analysis of the costs and consequences of a potential war. Just like in Iraq, a war on Mexico would be a war of choice, with American moral culpability for whatever furies it unleashes.

[David Frum: The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous]

It’s worth remembering that the war in Afghanistan included a failed counter-drug campaign. In my time there as a Marine lieutenant a decade ago, U.S. troops engaged in erratic, futile attempts to interrupt opium-poppy cultivation. Partnered with Afghanistan’s version of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, my company wasted days fruitlessly searching motorcycles at checkpoints on dusty village trails, finding no drugs. On one occasion, I was ordered to confiscate farmers’ wooden poppy scorers, simple finger-mounted tools used to harvest opium; at a cost of maybe a penny a piece, they were immediately replaced. U.S. planes bombed 200 Afghan drug labs during the occupation. Yet opium production skyrocketed—Afghanistan produced more than 80 percent of the global supply of the drug in the last years of the war.

Mexico would be an even riskier proposition. Start with the obvious: proximity. The direct costs to the United States of the War on Terror were enormous: $8 trillion squandered, more than 7,000 U.S. troops killed in action, tens of thousands wounded. Across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, were killed in counterinsurgency campaigns and civil wars. Governments were toppled, leaving behind anarchy and nearly 40 million refugees, who have further destabilized the region and its neighbors. But America itself was shielded from the worst effects of its hubris and militarism. Flanked by oceans and friendly neighbors, Americans didn’t have to worry about the conflicts coming home.

Any unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico would risk the collapse of a neighboring country of 130 million people. It could unleash civil war and a humanitarian crisis that would dwarf those in Iraq and Syria. This carnage would not be confined to Mexico. Some of America’s largest and wealthiest cities are a few hours’ drive from the border; nearly 40 million Americans are of Mexican descent, many of them with family members still living across the border. The cartels would not have far to travel to launch retaliatory terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. And the refugee crisis that many Republicans consider the preeminent national-security crisis would worsen.

The United States would also lack one major War on Terror asset: partners. A host of NATO and non-NATO partners contributed troops and resources to the fighting in Afghanistan; none would be willing to participate in an American attack on Mexico. Despite government corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan and dependency on U.S. weapons and technology, soldiers from those countries did the lion’s share of the fighting and dying in the long struggle against insurgents there. But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly rejected U.S. military intervention. One can easily imagine uniformed Mexican soldiers and policemen firing on American troops and aiding the cartels. If the U.S. were to attempt to build competing Mexican militias or proxies in response, it would further fracture the Mexican state.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

If there is an overriding lesson of America’s post-9/11 conflicts, it is that war unleashes a host of unintended consequences. A war of choice seldom respects the goals or limits set by its architects. External military intervention in a country fighting an insurgency—ideological, criminal, or otherwise—is particularly fraught. Foreign troops are far more likely to be an accelerant of violence than a dampener. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, cartel members would be likely to hide out among civilians, infiltrate Mexico’s already compromised security services, and find havens in bordering countries (the United States included). American forces would in turn be susceptible to corruption and infiltration, especially if an intervention were to drag on longer than expected.

Lacking a definable end state, a counter-cartel campaign would likely devolve into a manhunt for a few narco kingpins. Such an operation would be liable to create folk heroes out of brutal drug traffickers, one accidental wedding-party drone strike at a time. Some of the worst men on Earth could become global symbols of resistance to U.S. imperialism, especially if they are able to evade U.S. forces for a decade, as Osama bin Laden did. A U.S.-Mexico conflict would then become an opportunity for other American adversaries. Russia and China would undoubtedly be happy to arm the cartel insurgents, perhaps even overtly. Mexico already hosts more members of the GRU—Russia’s military intelligence—than any other foreign country. American arms and assistance are taking Russian lives in Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan a generation before. The Russians would welcome an easy opportunity to return the favor.

Since Trump’s ascent in 2016, the most bellicose neoconservatives in the GOP have been ousted, the Republican Party’s views on Russia and China have become muddled, and the Iraq War is now widely accepted as a disaster. But Republicans’ enthusiasm for launching a war on Mexico reveals the shallowness of their conversion. The rise of fentanyl is mostly a demand-side problem. Whatever Republican leaders say about “endless wars,” they’re once again pulling out the military hammer first, then looking for nails.

Biden has underscored the risk to democracy in a speech dedicated to his late Republican counterpart, John McCain.

There’s an expression reporters use, that you’ve “reported yourself out of a story.” That is, you had a hunch or a tip about something, but when you checked the facts, the story didn’t pan out. Sometimes, though, reporters stick to the narrative they’ve decided on in advance, and they don’t let facts get in the way.

The United Auto Workers union is striking for a better contract. The combination of a tight labor market and President Joe Biden’s pro-labor appointees to the National Labor Relations Board has given workers new leverage, leading workers in writers’ rooms, kitchens, and factories to demand more from their employers. This has been broadly beneficial, because many of the gains made by union workers benefit other workers.

Over the past few weeks, there have been whispers that former President Donald Trump would visit the striking UAW workers, with consequent fretting from Democrats in the press that Biden’s overall pro-union record would be overshadowed by photos of Trump on the picket line.

[David A. Graham: The press is giving Trump a free pass, again]

But that didn’t happen. Instead, it was Biden who went to support the striking autoworkers, joining a union picket line—something not even his most pro-union predecessors in the White House had ever done. “You saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble,” Biden told the striking workers Tuesday. “But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.”

A president on the picket line, telling workers they deserved to share in the wealth they had helped create, was a genuinely historic moment. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t do this. It’s shocking that Biden did.

But that wasn’t as interesting for many in the political press as the hypothetical story, the one that didn’t happen: a Republican presidential candidate winning over striking autoworkers by supporting their struggle for a better contract. Trump didn’t do that. In fact, Trump, who governed as a viciously anti-union president even by Republican standards, chose to visit a nonunion shop to give a campaign speech in which he said, “I don’t think you’re picketing for the right thing,” and told them it wouldn’t make “a damn bit of difference” what they got in their contract, because the growth in electric-vehicle manufacturing would put them out of work.

Telling striking workers that they should give up trying to get a better deal is not supporting workers or supporting unions; it is textbook union-busting rhetoric that anyone who has ever been in a union or tried to organize one would recognize. In other words, Trump did not go to Michigan to support striking workers at all. He did what cheap rich guys do every day: He told people who work for a living to be afraid of losing what little they have instead of trying to get what they deserve. This is not comparable to, nor is it even in the same galaxy as, supporting workers on a picket line. It is a poignant metaphor for the emptiness of right-wing populism when it comes to supporting workers—a cosplay populism of superficial “working class” aesthetics that ends up backing the bosses instead of the workers.

The narrative repeated ad nauseam by the political press that Trump was supporting the autoworkers was simply false. Should he reach the White House again, there’s little reason to doubt that his policies and appointments will be as anti-worker and anti-union as they were the first time.

“Just look who Trump put in the courts,” Dave Green, the UAW regional director for Ohio and Indiana, told the Associated Press this week. “Look at his record with the labor relations board. He did nothing to support organized labor except lip service.”

Some narratives, though, are too fun to let go of. So The New York Times reported that Trump was set to “Woo Striking Union Members,” without mentioning that he is appearing at a nonunion shop; The Wall Street Journal likewise left that out. Politico announced that Trump was going to “address striking auto workers,” acknowledging only later in the story that his appearance would be at “a non-union shop.” Many major news outlets did something similar, writing up a Trump campaign event in a way that left the impression that Trump was going to speak with striking autoworkers.

Many reports led with the suggestion that “current and former union members” would be in the audience, but that’s irrelevant. You could go anywhere in Detroit and find a crowd composed of “current and former union members”—it’s Detroit! The relevant fact is that Trump is not supporting the autoworkers’ efforts to win a contract that allows them their fair share of the wealth they create. What the Trump campaign wanted was ambiguous headlines that might suggest he was supporting workers he was not in fact supporting, so that he could get credit for something he didn’t actually do. And the political press largely obliged, repeatedly muddying the distinction between supporting union workers on strike and having a campaign rally.

[Read: The real issue in the UAW strike]

The Trump campaign is very good at manipulating the media, because it understands that liberal ideological bias is not the primary factor in shaping media coverage. The press, instead, is biased toward having a spectacular or interesting story that people want to read or watch or hear about. If you’re clever, you can manipulate the press into telling the story you want by making it seem fun and exciting, even if the story is incorrect or misleading. Given how easily the Trump campaign got the political press to take the bait here, there’s little question we’re in for a long campaign season in which it does it over and over again.

There’s another saying in journalism that’s supposed to be ironic: “Too good to check.” That’s when you hear something that sounds like a great story and you don’t check whether it’s true, because you want it to be true. You are not supposed to do this. But some narratives, it seems, are just too good to abandon.

Suddenly, it just tumbled out: "Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say."

That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”

Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.

Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.

All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.

[Read: A parade of listless vessels ]

How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.

One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday... but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”

At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”

[Here it comes]

“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”

“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.

The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.

The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”

[Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]

However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?

It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.

Candidates for 2024 nomination attack Trump for skipping the event as they talk immigration and the economy.