Oh, yes, they’re just politicians. This is how they think, and this is who they are. And that’s why Donald Trump is killing them.

Trump may be many things, but he is not much of a politician, at least in any traditional sense. Everyone else on the Republican debate stage last night was. I almost forgot that for a few hours. It was easy to lose sight of amid the high dudgeon over Trump from so many prominent Republicans. There were so many frantic declarations that Trump was a liar/know-nothing/potentially catastrophic con man, and whatever else Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were throwing at La Grande Orange in Detroit last night.

But in the end, the Republican debate came down to the one question I really wanted answered by the non-Trumpeters: Would they still commit to supporting the nominee of the Republican Party, even if he were Donald Trump? I mean, if he were as pure evil as they have been suggesting, shouldn’t that, er, trump whatever musty notions of party loyalty they still cling to?

Even with all the breathless predictions of catastrophe from many Republicans in recent weeks, relatively few elected officials have actually come out and said they would not support Trump in November under any circumstances — whether that meant staying home, holding out for some still-unseen third-party alternative or actually pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton. Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and the former New Jersey governor, Christie Whitman, have all said they would choose one of those alternatives. I’m sure there have been others, but not many. The band has been more of an a cappella group than a full orchestra to this point. That would have changed instantly had Cruz, Rubio or John Kasich actually joined them, which I would have thought — given some of the scorched-earth rhetoric — at least Cruz and Rubio would be ready to do.