On August 10, 2015, Donald Trump might have done the impossible: fight Fox and win. The leader in the Republican presidential primary opinion polls, Trump, has been warring the most powerful arm of the Republican Party, Fox News, for four days. The fight was dividing the whole conservative internet—there were accusations of unmanliness and political correctness and straight-up pay for play. Trump tweeted Sunday night, “It amazes me that other networks seem to treat me so much better than @FoxNews. I brought them the biggest ratings in history, & I get zip!” Obviously, "zip" wasn't quite accurate. In the last three months, Trump got more Fox airtime and appearances (31!) than any other Republican candidate. Fox had created the Trump monster it was now trying to kill. But in a twist on Frankenstein, the mob that appears at the end carrying pitchforks and torches is rooting for the monster.

The recent intramural war was shocking becuase conservative media usually easily unites around partisan memes. Mitt Romney's 47 percent comment was a version of an idea popularized by RedState editor and talk radio host Erick Erickson, who created a blog titled "We Are the 53%." In 2009, shortly after President Obama's inauguration, Karl Rove created the meme that Obama had conducted an international "apology tour" for America's sins, and it's never died. Mitt Romney titled his 2010 campaign book No Apology; in May, Mike Huckabee announced he was running for president and declared, "I will never, ever apologize for America!" But Donald Trump, a sort of living meme, has caused conservative media to turn on itself.

Trump is a symbol of an idea with a lot of emotion but not much depth: that if Republicans had the courage to be more mean—less politically correct—they could will their preferred policies into existence. Trump's great draw—as expressed by both pundits and voters—is that he says what he thinks, without fear of offending people. “He doesn’t know what ‘PC’ means,” a man said at a Trump party in New Hampshire in June. But being un-PC actually means you have the correct political opinions and offend an approved list of targets—Mexican immigrants, Rosie O'Donnell, feminazis, etc. This is why the Trump war got so ferocious. He started picking on someone who was not in the list: Megyn Kelly, one of the brightest stars of the Fox universe.

A long weekend’s worth of conservative drama, summarized:

A Public Policy Polling survey shows that in Iowa, Trump is still leading with 19 percent of the vote—"up with Evangelicals, men, women, voters in every age group, moderates, voters who are most concerned with having the candidate who is most conservative on the issues, and voters who are most concerned about having a candidate who can win the general election."

Rush Limbaugh indicates that just because Fox is conservative doesn't mean it's off the hook: "I don't think that a lot of these big players, including in the media, have any idea who their audiences are.... I don't think they have the slightest idea the size of and the amount of real anger out there directed at them. It goes so far beyond the fact that they're biased."

The whole time, Trump did not stop bashing Kelly. "There has been so much invective directed at her on the Internet that it’s created security concerns for Fox," CNN reported. On Friday, pundit-hating journalist Nate Silver declared, "Donald Trump Won’t Win A War Against Fox News." Conservatives say they trust Fox, Silver argued, so his complaints were "likely to fall on deaf ears." It was a strong prediction, but, for now, not a correct one.