This is the game we play after every Republican debate: the mainstream press corps finds some tortured explanation for why Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz won, and then days later Donald Trump rises in the polls. In a night where CNN ran a headline reading “Donald Trump defends size of his penis”, the man has probably won yet again.

Any doubt of Trump’s tenacity was dispelled by the live crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a ballroom full of establishment Republicans watching the combat on giant projection screens, and laughing with He Of The Dyson Airbladed Hair in spite of themselves.

The media has only lately come round to the notion that perhaps its political Geiger counter is no longer detecting radiation but screaming a New York tune like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. But the revolutionary act of admitting that you can be wrong does not get you all the way to being right. And it will be incredibly tempting for the same wisdom to hand this night to Cruz or Rubio.

Both candidates battered Trump repeatedly and well, according to the conventional political rules of debates. They even tag-teamed Trump on a couple lines. But the old logic has failed us. We are not the same political people anymore, no longer bounded to conventional metaphysics. Maybe it is no longer possible to die.

For every argument that should make sense, it is easy to proffer an immediate Trumpian counterpoint. Cruz and Rubio alley-ooped mockery of him? Under normal circumstances, that’s just the two responsible candidates beating down a punk. Now, every Trump voter sees two congenital wusses who can only win by teaming up, two loser would-be antagonists so weak that even their insults need a partnership.

Even Fox News itself appeared to drop a lead weight on the scale to give this one to Cruz, the only viable remaining Not Trump candidate. When the audience applauded Cruz, Fox cut to cheers. When Trump got booed, they cut to those as well. See, it seemed to say, you know which way this is going.

Fox even demanded that Trump explain how his own absurd tax-cut giveaway to the wealthy is going to correct the federal debt, as well as account for how his prescription drug plan will save taxpayers money while covering all Americans who qualify.

That’s just how far these people have gone on beyond zebra. After a quarter century of allowing any Republican candidate to generate any trillion-dollar figure by throwing 13 dice in the air and counting whatever numbers appeared – after allowing eight years of “repeal and replace Obamacare” without giving a tinker’s damn about what the “replace” part looked like (if it even existed at all) – a conservative outlet demanded that a conservative explain how supply-side economics works, do something that looked like math and provide a plan that makes sense.

You know the instruments of the right are losing when they have to move left to correct themselves.

Again, it probably won’t work. For that, you just had to look at the audience at ground zero of the conservative movement.

People don’t attend CPAC on a lark. It costs $300 to register, and the expensive hotels near where the event is held usually run over $200 per night. That’s $700 just to walk around conference rooms with a lanyard, pressed khakis and a titanic sense of entitlement to American hegemony.

These people were not Trump fans. As the Fox moderators introduced each candidate, the cheers followed their status within acceptable conservatism. John Kasich, the candidate running on the Sensible Stepdad platform, complete with flagrant lack of intolerance for gays and their ilk, received scattered cheers. Trump garnered healthy applause and some boos. Cruz received an even larger cheer and some boos as well. The room erupted for Marco Rubio, the Ken doll avatar of CPAC crushes.

And yet Trump won them over, time and again. Rubio had made jokes about his penis over the last week, and Trump just said: “It’s never been a problem” – and the entire room nearly whooped like a daytime talkshow audience. Cruz burned him, and he burned back, and they cheered. Rubio came after him, and they cheered.

Not everyone applauded Trump, but the volume of the laughs and clapping and did he just do that? moments was enough to overcome even the most ingrained institutional dislike. Even in an audience pre-selected by cost and orthodoxy to oppose him.



If Trump could win points there, just imagine what happened among the people who have no fealty to movement conservatism, who have nurtured a sustained rage at being betrayed or ignored by its bromides, who have been told that conservatism is good for them even as they have seen the middle class begin to crater around them like a suburban Florida neighborhood pockmarking with sinkholes during a long drought.

If Donald Trump can win in enemy territory, consider just how much he succeeded among the villagers living in the crumbling outposts that conservatism has long abandoned.