Over the past few days, Donald Trump has said and done things that have raised more doubts about his temperament, judgment, and command of policy issues. Photograph by Al Drago / CQ Roll Call / Getty

If Donald Trump were a normal political candidate, he would be in serious trouble at the moment. Over the past few days, he has said and done things that have raised more doubts about his temperament, judgment, and command of policy issues. Some of the Republicans trying to prevent him from becoming the Party’s Presidential nominee believe that they’re finally making progress. Are they right?

Trump is undoubtedly having a bad week. His initial refusal to condemn his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was accused of manhandling a female reporter, Michelle Fields, and lying about what happened, was wrong—but it was also in line with Trump’s policy of never conceding anything or apologizing unless he absolutely has to. For a time, the facts of the incident, which took place after a press conference at one of Trump’s resort properties in Jupiter, Florida, were disputed, and Trump could hide behind the pretense that this was case of “he said, she said.”

After Tuesday, when police in Jupiter charged Lewandowski with battery and released a security video that showed him grabbing Fields’s arm and turning her around, the situation became very different. (Lewandowski denies the charges.) Practically any other candidate would have fired Lewandowski, or at least severely reprimanded him; said sorry to Fields; and tried to move on. Far from doing any of these things, Trump sought to deny the evidence provided by the video. Not only that, he defended Lewandowski’s actions, on the grounds that Fields might have represented a physical threat to him. “She had a pen in her hand which the Secret Service is not liking because they don’t know what it is, whether it’s a little bomb,” he said on CNN.

This reaction didn’t just make Trump look deluded, sexist, and cowardly—it provided his political enemies with more ammunition to use against him. “No ambiguity @realDonaldTrump is trying to justify violence against women: defenders of domestic/work violence can use Trump talking points,” Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney who is part of the Never Trump movement, tweeted on Wednesday. On Thursday morning, Stevens was still revelling in the story. “Put me down as believing both the First and, apparently, Second Amendments protect reporters right to carry pens,” he tweeted.

If Trump wasn’t already in enough trouble with female voters—last week, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that forty-seven per cent of Republican women couldn’t imagine voting for him—he made things even worse on Wednesday, when he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, during a town-hall meeting in Wisconsin, that women who seek abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment.” After media outlets seized on those incendiary words, Trump issued a written statement recanting them. It said that if Congress enacted a ban on abortion, a policy that Trump now supports, “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb.”

This rapid about-face only served to highlight the fact that Trump had again presented his opponents with a gift. “Of course we shouldn’t be talking about punishing women; we should affirm their dignity and the incredible gift they have to bring life into the world,” Ted Cruz said. John Kasich made similar comments. Hillary Clinton described Trump’s initial remarks as “horrific and telling.”

The irony in all of this is that, of all the Republican candidates, Trump is historically perhaps the least hostile to abortion rights. Cruz is so ardently opposed to abortion that he doesn’t favor exceptions in the case of rape or incest. Kasich does, but he has been pro-life for a long time, while Trump hasn’t. In 1999, Trump said that he was “very pro-choice.” Many Republicans suspect that this is still his real view, and they believe that the reason he struggles to articulate his current stance is that he doesn’t believe in it. After Trump made his statement about punishing women who terminated their pregnancies, Brian Phillips, the rapid-response director for the Cruz campaign, said on Twitter, “Don’t overthink it: Trump doesn’t understand the pro-life position because he’s not pro-life.”

That sounds about right. But abortion is far from the only issue on which Trump tends to waffle or goof up when he is asked detailed questions. The same thing applies to his foreign policy, his trade policy, even his calls to deport illegal immigrants and ban Muslims from entering the United States. Ask him how he would round up eleven million people or which nationalities would be on his no-entry list, and he can’t answer. Trump doesn’t do details. He never has.

When there were ten, or six, candidates in the Republican field, and a televised debate was taking place every week, this didn’t matter much. The jostling in the horse race was the big story, and Trump could get away with generalizations. Now the contest is down to three candidates; there aren’t any debates to dominate the daily news cycle; and the Never Trump folks are harrying the front-runner constantly. With the spotlight on him, the cracks in his candidacy are becoming all too visible.

Earlier this week, Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump, endorsed Ted Cruz, saying that his ex-boss lacked the policy substance and intellectual coherence to be President. To be sure, Nunberg isn’t the most desirable of character witnesses. Last summer, Trump fired him after it emerged that he had used racist and derogatory language on Facebook posts. But Nunberg’s comments about Trump’s inattention to detail were in line with the testimony of others who have worked with him over the years. Nunberg said that he began to grow concerned last fall, when, during a debate, Trump didn’t appear to know what the nuclear triad was. “I was concerned but I figured that he would bulk up on policy,” Nunberg told Politico. “He has not. I do not see a candidate who takes these issues seriously.”

Of course, Trump’s core supporters aren’t backing him for his knowledge of the relative merits of land-based, sea-based, and air-based nuclear missiles. They like his nativism, his derisive attitude toward President Obama, his attacks on the media, his populist tirades about trade treaties destroying American jobs, and the fact that he isn’t a professional politician. Critical commentaries by journalists and interventions by the likes of Stevens and Romney aren’t going to make much impression on Trump’s backers, some of whom may even condone the candidate’s misogynistic attacks on women like Fields, Carly Fiorina, and Megyn Kelly.

The question is, and has been, how large a segment of the Republican electorate the Trump faithful constitute. Most analysts reckon that it’s about a third. That means Trump, to get the twelve hundred and thirty-seven delegates he needs for a majority, also has to draw in some Republicans who like some of what he says and stands for, but not all of it. In states like Arizona, Florida, and Mississippi, he has managed to do this, receiving nearly half the vote. But in other states, such as Illinois and Kentucky, he has been held to the mid-thirties.

Wisconsin, where forty-two delegates are at stake, seems to be another state where Trump is struggling to move beyond his base. Having secured the backing of Governor Scott Walker and other local notables, Cruz appears to have the momentum going into Tuesday’s contest, which will award eighteen delegates to the statewide winner and a total of twenty-four to the winners of individual districts. But, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten, if the Marquette Law School poll, which was released this week and shows Cruz leading by ten points, turns out to be accurate, Trump could end up winning hardly any delegates at all, which would deal the heaviest blow yet to his campaign.