Donald Trump was grilled about his inheritance, his fuzzy budget math and his mysterious off-the-record chat with The New York Times. | AP Photo 2016 The strangest attack on Trump Rubio and Cruz repeatedly press him on his poll standing, the one issue he can't stop talking about.

On Thursday night, Donald Trump was forced to defend his ideology, his veracity, his maturity, and even his sanity. He was attacked over Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump ties and the Trump real estate empire. He was grilled about his inheritance, his flip-flops, his fuzzy budget math, his hiring of foreign workers, his frequent donations to Democrats, his unapologetic support for torture, his infamous Ku Klux Klan interview, and his mysterious off-the-record chat with The New York Times.

Of course, the say-anything front-runner was expected to find himself on the defensive, although perhaps not to the extent that a CNN headline would read “Donald Trump defends size of his penis.” But amid this festival of insults, there was one line of attack that Trump clearly welcomed, for staggeringly obvious reasons: Attacks on his standing in the race. There’s nothing Trump likes talking about more than winning, but for some reason, the candidates who have been losing kept challenging him about it.


Ted Cruz was the first of Trump’s rivals to dwell on the horse race, bragging that “our campaign over and over again has beaten Donald Trump.” Sure, and his home-state Dallas Cowboys won some games last season, but they didn’t win the Super Bowl.

“For the record,” Trump sneered, “I have won ten. He has won three or four.” There was something delicious about Trump’s inability to pin down the precise number. And he quickly noted that Marco Rubio has done even worse. “On Tuesday, I was half a million votes higher than Ted. I was a million votes higher than Marco. I keep hearing that he’s the only one that can beat me, but he is getting beaten very, very badly.”

In the Trump worldview, there are winners and losers, and there’s no arguing with winning. His predictable response to a question about Mitt Romney’s speech portraying him as a deranged con artist was that Mitt Romney is a proven loser. “He failed miserably, and it was an embarrassment to everybody,” Trump scoffed. For Trump, that's QED.

Nevertheless, Rubio, after admitting that Trump has done well so far, took another shot at his standing. “Here is what the numbers also say: Two thirds of the people who cast a vote in a Republican primary or caucus have voted against you. They do not want you to be our nominee.” By that logic, of course, considerably more than two thirds do not want Rubio to be their nominee. And as Trump immediately explained to the rival he would later call “Little Marco,” that logic has not been borne out by the national polls he's dominating.

“Very nice words but happens to be wrong,” Trump said. “CNN just did a poll where he is at 15 percent. And I’m at 49 percent.” Rubio interjected that Trump has struggled in head-to-head matchups with Hillary Clinton. “Wrong,” Trump said. “I beat Hillary Clinton in many polls.”

And then, because Trump is Trump, he started naming the polls: Quinnipiac, Fox, USA Today. He often struggles to demonstrate elementary-school knowledge of foreign and domestic policy, but he is a graduate-level student of the polls.

Incredibly, Cruz returned to the topic later in the debate, bragging about his few victories, urging “the 65 to 70 percent of Republicans who recognize that nominating Donald would be a disaster” to unite behind his candidacy. Trump seemed genuinely and uncharacteristically perplexed that Cruz would bother to go there.

“I don’t believe these politicians,” Trump sputtered. “I’m standing here listening to — I’m hearing him say a percentage. CNN, he gets 15 percent, that means, based on what you’re saying, that 85 percent of the people don’t want you. Is that a correct statement?” Trump babbled a bit more about numbers, then delivered the knockout punch in the Trumpian third person.

“Everybody knows that on Super Tuesday, Trump was the winner,” Trump said. “I am by far the leader. But if you listen to a politician, he’ll try to convince you otherwise.”

As Cruz pointed out, “Donald lives by the polls every day.” They provide him with constant validation that he’s on the right path, and that his rivals are ridiculous losers. If he’s such a sexist, racist, fascist buffoon, like they keep saying, then how come he’s whipping them? To a large extent, Trump’s agenda for America depends on his poll numbers, because it’s all about winning, about beating China and Mexico and all those other countries he claims are eating America’s lunch, about winning so much we’ll be tired of winning. It’s the kind of argument that wouldn’t work well if he were losing.

Maybe that’s why Trump, uncharacteristically, avoided a fight with John Kasich over poll numbers. Unlike Cruz and Rubio, Kasich has refused to brawl with Trump; he’s positioned himself as the above-the-fray adult in the room. “You know, this is so much about process,” he said when he was asked about his path to victory. “It frankly is boring to me.” But Kasich could not resist pointing out that in a head-to-head matchup, he beat Clinton by 11 points, better than any other Republican.

Trump did not call Kasich a liar, because he knew it was true. He did not mock Kasich’s appearance, or even his fourth-place standing. He interrupted, which was par for the course, but only momentarily, which was quite unusual. Trump is crushing his competition in the GOP primary, but he would have huge vulnerabilities in a general election, which is why his party is in a panic — and why he preferred not to dwell on Kasich's relative strength.

“In one poll,” Trump said. “In one poll.” And then he shut up.