FLINT, MICHIGAN—This is something that He, Trump said on Saturday night. I mention it because I think it marks a severe downturn in He, Trump's campaign. He prospered as a vulgar talking yam. Then, he became the most boring person on earth—the endless bore in the clubhouse bar who talks you through his entire round.

"I hit a ball 280 yards. Stand up! Do I hit good? Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong? I simply held up the hands. They're fairly large, actually."

First of all, I don't believe He, Trump can hit it 280 without a howitzer in his bag, unless of course he's playing with the late Kim Jong-Il at Prevarication Hills in Pyongyang. (That distance, by the way, would place him no worse than seventh place in the PGA's driving distance standings this year.) But listening to him brag about it on the podium last night reminded me of nothing more that Dan Jenkins's classic rejoinder to some classic example of the type: "Hoss, if I have to go all 18 with you, I'm going to need caddy fees."

In truth, he might just have been a little unnerved. Suddenly, it is obvious that the only real competition he has is Tailgunner Ted Cruz, and that puts He, Trump, a charlatan who only recently became a kind of monster, in a head-to-head brawl with someone who has been raised since birth to be one. Trump is an opportunist who saw a chance and half-ran, half-stumbled toward it. Cruz is someone who's had his eyes on the prize since before Princeton and Harvard Law loosed him upon the world. Trump is a man of grandiose, hopelessly vague promises. Cruz is dead-serious about hauling the country into retrograde theocracy and Gilded Age economics. Trump places his faith in Two Corinthians, which I believe is a pizza and sandwich joint on Staten Island. Cruz considers himself to be both a vehicle for political extremism and the instrument of the living God. You decide which frightens you more.

Here is something about the hotel in which I am staying in this poisoned city. When you make your reservation online, the property makes a point to tell you that the water for the facility comes from the Genesee County water system, so feel free to take a shower without worrying that your nose will fall off, or that, somewhere between the shampoo and the conditioner, your IQ will drop 50 points. Those concerns are for the people who live here, in the Other parts of the city. What has happened here is a perfect bell-jar specimen of the principles of conservative Republican governance that Ted Cruz seeks to bring to the entire nation.

Here in Michigan, the attention paid to the misfeasance and malfeasance of the administration of Governor Rick Snyder is causing even the elite political media to notice that Snyder is hardly an outlier among his fellow Republican governors. They've noticed that the lab rat is dying in Kansas, where Ted Cruz won overwhelmingly among Republican voters on Saturday. They've noticed the catastrophe left behind in Louisiana by former presidential candidate "Bobby" Jindal. They've noticed how far along are the efforts of former presidential candidate Scott Walker to turn Wisconsin into a banana republic. And, if you roll all of these disasters up in a big ball—Sam Brownback's batshit economics in Kansas, Jindal's legacy of corporate sycophancy in Louisiana, Snyder's disinclination to respond to an emergency that does not affect his donor class, and Walker's greed for political power—you get the platform of presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who would like you to know that he welcomes all of their support.

All you need for confirmation of this is to look at what happened in Washington at the end of this week. A proposal for federal aid to the embattled citizens of Flint came before the Senate. This was a bipartisan effort, with Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan being joined in the effort by, of all people, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. Alas, they did not reckon with Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from the state of Utah. Lee refused unanimous consent on the measure, effectively jamming it up.

"Michigan has an enormous budget surplus this year and a large rainy-day fund," Lee said. "Relief and repair efforts are already in the works. The people and policymakers of Michigan right now have all the government resources they need to fix the problem. … The only thing Congress is contributing to the Flint recovery is political grandstanding."

In addition to demonstrating that Lee is very close to being a completely unfeeling bastard, this statement is a clear and unequivocal declaration of faith in the kind of devolution of federal responsibilities to the states in which both Cruz and Lee believe—an example of pure and undistilled Tentherism. This is the Articles of Confederation in action. Both men believe that the proper role of the federal government is to defer to the authority of people like Snyder, Jindal, Brownback, and Walker, and the pet legislatures that enabled them. (And that's not even to mention that, since the Flint story broke, Snyder has had the local government jumping through hoops.) Ted Cruz imbibed this faith early in life and he has never wavered in his fealty to it. It is important at this point to mention that Mike Lee is perhaps the only friend Ted Cruz has made since being elected to the Senate. However, Lee backed Cruz's futile government shutdown and saw his polling back home fall into a ravine. This probably accounts for why Lee hasn't yet formally endorsed his running buddy.

On Sunday night, the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates will debate in this broken and wounded place. They will do so in the shadow of a Republican campaign that has come down to a choice between a bizarre political freak show with overtones of Mussolini and a cool, calculated attempt to turn American government back into the kind of fearsome Darwinian experiment in laissez-faire neglect that has failed time and again through history. That is what has come out of Saturday's results, and there is nothing funny about it.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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