Donald Trump upended the 2016 election cycle by being such a vulgar purveyor of indecency that no other candidate successfully stooped low enough to go toe-to-toe with him. He managed to prevail partly because he forced people to play at his exceedingly abysmal depths of depravity—impossible for anyone with even the tiniest hint of integrity.

Ever since then, political observers have been wondering: How do you beat someone with absolutely no sense of shame? The answer, as House Democrats' historic wins in 2018 proved, was that you play your game, not his. During the midterms, Democratic candidates ignored Trump entirely and focused on health care, health care, and health care. As Trump wildly beat his nativist drum hyping his crisis at the border and the caravan, Democrats just kept talking health care and other pocket book issues. It worked to stunning effect.

But in 2020, the Democratic nominee won't have the luxury of just outright ignoring Trump. The maniacal tweeter will surely be hurling daggers by the hour and eventually the nominee will have to face him down on the debate stage. That means Democrats need someone so confident in their message, so certain about where they plan to lead the country, that Trump's rampant carpet bombing won't throw them off their game.

In other words, Democrats need a candidate who will set the terms of the debate and just slough off of the rest of the drivel from Trump and the media like unwanted blubber.

The candidate that has repeatedly demonstrated that faculty is Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has rooted her campaign so firmly in her personal biography and belief system that she is campaigning from the core of her being rather than a sheet of poll-tested talking points. Simply put, she's authentic. And the more people see of Warren as she engages in the hard-scrabble work of person-to-person retail politics, the more they like her.

Crucially, Warren has over and over again decided to play on the field of her own choosing. Instead of doing the high-dollar fundraisers that every other candidate has been doing, she opted out to spend more time and energy on regular voters. Instead of shying away from the type of wonky policy talk that usually makes voters' eyes glaze over, she released week after week of detailed explanations on how she plans to get the government back to working for the people. But beyond the overarching decisions that have distinguished her campaign from others, she has also proven to be deft at drawing her own battle lines amid the type of verbal sparring that often lures candidates into troubled territory.

No better example of that exists than the two-plus minutes Warren spent beating back a gotcha question from one of media's most relentless attack dogs, MSNBC's Chris Matthews. The moment came just after Warren’s appearance in the second debate and Matthews was keen on pressing a question that Warren had left for dead on the debate stage—whether Medicare For All would require raising people's taxes.