“Let’s get to be a little establishment,” Trump told a recent rally. He’s been basking in the way Republican honchos are “warming up” to him.

Under normal conditions, if a party was confronted with a candidate who had never held any public office, whose political activism consisted mainly of trying to prove Barack Obama was born in Africa, and whose platform consisted of whatever stuff was getting good crowd response at the last rally, everybody would race to get behind the alternative.

So if Trump does win this thing, he’ll owe it all to the terribleness of Ted Cruz.

Cruz is the No. 2 every politician dreams of being stacked up against in a contest where the road is long and, sooner or later, everybody needs a friend. It’s fascinating how much his fellow Republicans hate this guy.

This week, even as National Review launched a roundup of conservatives saying, in effect, Donald Trump, oh God, no, party leaders were sending out signals that he was someone they could live with if the other choice was Cruz.

Policywise, Cruz isn’t much different from every other Republican running around Iowa and New Hampshire. So it’s just him. Even in a world full of egotists, the senator from Texas is regarded as off the charts.

When John McCain was running for president and ran into controversy about being born outside the United States, his colleagues passed a bipartisan resolution stating that, in their opinion, he met all the constitutional requirements. When the Canada thing came up with Cruz, there was dead silence. You could sort of imagine the entire Senate sitting, twiddling their thumbs and smirking.

Besides his talent for not being Ted Cruz, Trump’s other strong suit for Republican leaders is the suspicion that he doesn’t particularly believe anything he says. It’s not that he disbelieves it. His positions are more like thoughts of the moment, or opening bids. “He’s got the right personality, and he’s kind of a deal-maker,” Bob Dole told The Times’s Jonathan Martin.