Donald Trump came out ahead in the South Carolina Republican primary; with Jeb Bush now gone from the race, it may be a three-man contest between Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Credit Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty Images

“It’s tough, it’s nasty, it’s mean, it’s vicious,” Donald Trump said of the Republican primaries, in his victory rally in South Carolina on Saturday night. He paused. “It’s beautiful. When you win, it’s beautiful.” Trump won the state with close to thirty-three per cent of the vote, beating Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who were virtually tied at 22.5 and 22.3 per cent, respectively. Trump asked for a few words from his wife, Melania (“an amazing place, South Carolina!”), and from his daughter Ivanka (“an amazing, amazing night!”). He then told the audience that Cruz and Rubio had done a nice job; he did not mention Jeb Bush, whom he had just driven from the race. Bush came in fourth, with less than eight per cent of the vote, and announced, with his wife, Columba, crying on the stage behind him, that he was suspending his campaign. But then Bush, who never walked onto a debate stage without looking mildly surprised to find serious competitors up there, didn’t mention Trump, either. His departure is a testament to the futility of pretending that Trump couldn’t possibly be the Republican nominee, or the President.

Cruz and Rubio gave what sounded like victory speeches, too. Both claimed to have defied expectations, although they did not. Rubio failed to fully come back from his bad debate and subsequent fifth-place loss in New Hampshire, despite having Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, campaigning for him. Cruz, in third place, claimed to have “made history,” without explaining how. And they both made it clear that they want this to be seen as a three-man race, although Governor John Kasich and Ben Carson, who each got less than eight per cent of the vote, said that they would be staying in. Cruz, in his speech, tried to argue that it was already a two-man race—“Only one candidate remaining has a consistent conservative record,” he said. He was “the only conservative in a position to beat Donald Trump.” Throughout the primaries, there has been talk of “lanes,” and a yearning, on the part of the Republican establishment, for someone to emerge in the moderate lane who can confront Trump. Now Cruz is trying to upend that hope, by arguing that Trump—who, in a speech on Friday night, speculated about using bullets dipped in pig’s blood against Muslim insurgents—is the moderate.

In the last days of the campaign, a pro-Cruz Super PAC* ran radio ads and robocalls warning that Trump was insufficiently deferential to the Confederate flag—“our flag,” the ads called it—and was much too willing to give equal rights to gays and lesbians, which would amount to “tearing down our Judeo-Christian values” and “tearing down our America.” Cruz has long made a point of Trump’s pro-choice past. After he ran an ad suggesting that Trump still held such positions, Trump sent him a cease-and-desist letter. Trump’s comments about how, after getting rid of Obamacare, he’d do something to make sure that people weren’t “dying in the streets” became evidence of his apostasy, especially after he seemed to say that he liked the law’s individual mandate. (Afterward, Trump said that he meant the ban on excluding patients with pre-existing conditions.) Still, Cruz seemed to gain some traction, perhaps because this was the first time that another Republican had really attacked Trump on matters of policy, rather than for his style. What is remarkable, and alarming for the future of the Republican Party, is that the only such attack a candidate has mustered against Trump has come from so far to the right.

Trump’s response to everything that was thrown at him was to call Cruz a liar—“the biggest single liar” he had ever seen. Trump had a couple of witnesses to help make that case. After the Cruz campaign put out a badly Photoshopped picture, in which a very short version of Rubio appeared to be shaking hands with Barack Obama, Rubio said, “The picture’s fake and that alone tells you everything I’ve been saying for the last few days. He’s making things up.” And there is Ben Carson, whose presence in the race is a reminder of Cruz’s dirty tricks in Iowa. On Friday, the Daily Beast reported, Cruz arranged to meet with Carson to try to placate him. It “did not go well,” the Carson campaign said. Cruz is not popular with his colleagues in the Senate; he has tried to portray that as evidence of his courageous stance against “the Washington cartel.” Voters may conclude that Cruz’s problem is not his steadfastness, or even an unpleasant personality, but his character. It was Trump who won evangelical voters, according to exit polls.

Cruz’s presentation of himself as the only conservative in the race also ignores a basic truth about Marco Rubio: he is very conservative, on a range of issues from reproductive rights to foreign policy. He condones domestic surveillance and torture. He regularly suggests that Obama is deliberately harming America, and he is, in many ways, more of a hawk than Cruz. This is why they end up yelling at each other in debates about the relatively arcane question of which one briefly supported an immigration-reform bill that both now reject. Rubio may be viewed as callow and artificial by some, or as the most personable candidate left in the race by others; but it is, as Margaret Talbot has noted, a mistake to see him as the voice of the middle. This week, Trump railed against Pope Francis after the pontiff said that anyone who wanted to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border was no Christian. (“Disgraceful,” Trump said, and then concluded that the Mexicans had somehow got to Francis.) It is hard to know if Trump was punished for that in the polls, given that both Rubio and Cruz want a wall, too.

Jeb Bush’s evaporation comes a week after he was praised, perhaps overpraised, for taking on Trump at the Republican debate in Greenville, South Carolina. He complained that Trump insulted people, particularly members of the Bush family. He responded to Trump’s blunt comments criticizing the Iraq War and noting that George W. Bush was President on September 11th with overwrought shock that was muddled by family loyalty. Bush also said, “I won the lottery when I was born sixty-three years ago and looked up and saw my mom”—a sentence not designed to reassure voters who saw him as a befuddled dynast. For anyone who had missed that point, Bush spent the next week surrounded by his family, as the campaign’s supporters talked about how beloved George W. Bush was in South Carolina, which might have been relevant if that Bush had been on the ballot. There is no tragedy of anachronistic niceness in Jeb Bush’s fall; his shortcomings as a candidate were visible before Trump even got into the race. Jeb Bush and the Super PAC supporting him spent more than a hundred million dollars on this campaign. He had the means to confront Trump on the level of ideas, rather than manners; he never really did.

Trump has a substantial lead in the polls in the next contest, in Nevada, and he is well positioned in the states in the so-called S.E.C. primary, on March 1st—Super Tuesday. Trump could still lose the nomination. He could also have it taken from him at a brokered convention, if he doesn’t get an outright majority of the delegates. (He seems to have secured every one of South Carolina’s fifty.) What little caution he has might dissipate—why shouldn’t it?—and he may finally say or do something that makes him unelectable. That may now mean that either Cruz or Rubio will win, though Kasich will likely stay in for as long as he can, because this is a year in which strange things can happen. A rationalized, three- or two-person race is what the Republican Party establishment has claimed to want all along. With this final three, though, it might beware of getting what it wishes for. Cruz and Rubio may now set off on a three-man race to the edge with Trump, not a battle with Trumpism. Even when, or if, the nomination is set, the soul of the Republican Party is likely to remain in limbo for a while.

*This sentence has been changed to indicate that the Super PAC, rather than the campaign, paid for the ads.