A lot can happen through three hours of political debate, enough to carry multiple headlines and just as many different analytical perspectives. Even before the main-stage debate Thursday night, a consensus gelled that Carly Florina had distinguished herself among the also-rans, that Rick Perry continues to struggle to communicate extemporaneously, and that most of the seven candidates who didn’t make the top 10 didn’t make it for a reason.

But nothing that any individual candidate—including Donald Trump—said or did tonight stuck out as more significant than the thematic fact that Republicans are still tripping over the long tail of the 2012 election.

Part of what makes this process so awkward for them is that the GOP never really reached consensus about what it needed to do differently in 2016 to avoid the result it achieved four years ago. Some of them think the biggest error Republicans committed in the last election was racing to a rightmost position on immigration at the beck and call of xenophobes. Others think it was Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s breezy willingness to disparage “takers”—and Romney’s statements about the 47 percent specifically. Still more thought the party’s only error was nominating a candidate whom conservatives didn’t instinctively trust.

Every single opposing viewpoint in this dispute is represented in the current primary—and among the Fox News moderators and other conservative journalists who have the greatest access to the candidates—and the result is deeply unstable equilibrium between factions. The Republican Party is trapped at the center of a tug-of-war between its own ego and the conservative id.

Donald Trump personifies this dynamic more than any other candidate. Surrounded by Republicans who vowed not to run independent candidacies, he refused to take the same pledge, making explicit reference to the leverage his threat gives him against a cowering GOP establishment. He swatted away questions about his crude sexism by attacking political correctness and reiterated his view that the government of Mexico is sending rapists and murderers to the United States. And nobody was willing (or able) to take issue with any of the substantive claims he made, except insofar as he represented himself as a true Republican.