Well, that was fun.

Still trying to process the news that my old friend and mentor Justice Antonin Scalia had died, I wasn’t much in the mood to watch the GOP debate in South Carolina. But, boy, I’m glad I did. People who are focused on the explosive back-and-forth between Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump or Sen. Marco Rubio and Cruz are missing the larger, more important narrative.

After New Hampshire, the Establishment and their supporters in the conservative press decided to duck a substantive debate with Trump over globalization. Instead, they decided to emphasize two personal attacks: (1) Trump isn’t really a conservative, and (2) Trump doesn’t have the character to be president. Last night Jeb Bush and Cruz decided to try those attacks with Trump in the room, and we got his response.

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Interestingly, he has decided, for the most part, not to duck these challenges, or to appeal for common ground. Instead, Trump’s answer to both attacks is that his judgment is better, and more conservative, than that of his opponents.

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Consider what Trump argued at the South Carolina debate:

1: On foreign policy, he claimed that his judgment on Iraq was better than George W.’s. Not only that, but that George W. failed in the most basic duty of a president: to keep us safe. 9/11 happened on W’s watch, and W should bear the blame for it.

2: On judges, Trump claims that his judgment is better than that of Ted Cruz and W, who gave us John Roberts. For years, it was safe for GOP candidates to say they’d pick justices like Roberts. Now Trump is saying that because of Roberts’ votes to uphold Obamacare, that choice was a mistake.

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3: On the budget, Trump went after the recent budget deal made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Speaker John Boehner. In other words, he’s saying that the GOP’s congressional leadership has failed.

In short, Trump has attacked the top GOP people in all three branches of government, saying that all of them have failed the country and failed conservatives. He also said that Jeb was a failed governor. He is trying to convince GOP voters to turn on their leaders and write off the last 15 years as a failure.

The stakes got raised Saturday night. Trump is not merely claiming he can manage the GOP better than the other candidates. He is arguing that the GOP, and its leaders, are wrong — badly wrong — on the very issues where they are supposed to be experts.

In some ways, this is a risky move. But I think Trump properly realizes that you can’t win a revolution if the peasants are still loyal to the old King. In the end, the voters may go for Bushism. But Trump’s instincts are telling him that if that’s what they want, he can’t win anyway.

So Trump has apparently decided that in order to win this thing, he has to crush the Bushes once and for all. It may not work — Republicans may not be willing to go that far. But on the other hand, Trump has now created a dynamic where a victory in South Carolina will be seen as vindication for his attacks on George W. And that would be huge.

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Now all eyes turn to W. He is coming out of retirement to defend his legacy, and Trump is trying to force him into a debate on his own record — a debate Bush has consistently avoided for a very long time. Will W defend his administration? If so, will that persuade GOPers? Or will he duck the question? (But how can he duck such a big question that is so personal to himself?)

Maybe Trump didn’t have to go this far — maybe he could have won by playing nice from here on out, but that’s doubtful. (He certainly didn’t and shouldn’t have said “Bush lied, People died,” repeating the mantra of the anti-war Left.)

Let’s face it, Trump was never going to win on temperament — he has to win the argument on the merits. Maybe he doesn’t have the ability to do that, or maybe his efforts to try will backfire. But in that case, he probably wouldn’t have won anyway.

From the beginning, he’s understood that his real fight is with George W. and the Bush machine. And now that fight will play out in public, which is better for Trump than having it play out behind the scenes.

The next 10 days will tell us a lot.