A viewer needed only one image from the Republican presidential debate last week to see how completely Donald Trump has taken over the Republican Party. There were eight men and two women on the stage. And every single one of the men — the seven male candidates and one male moderator — was dressed in Trump’s trademark uniform of a dark blue suit and a bright red necktie.

The moderator described Trump as the elephant who was not in the room. His absence did loom large. Many polls give him a 30- to 40-point lead in the race for the Republican nomination. So long as Trump holds that lead, those who showed up on Wednesday night are little more than players in a political “fantasy football” league.

A few candidates did try to distinguish themselves. Nikki Haley broke from most of the others over climate change, government spending and abortion. Mike Pence got nearly all of the others to say that he did the right thing on Jan. 6.

Most of the candidates tiptoed around Trump and could not avoid embracing his excesses, even his four indictments. When asked who would still support Trump for president if he gets convicted of any of the charges against him, six of the eight challengers raised their hands. So much for any claims to being members of what was once the law-and-order party.

Throughout the evening, the audience responses were more telling than the candidates’ responses. There were cheers when Vivek Ramaswamy praised and channeled Donald Trump. The kid billionaire called Trump “the best president of the 21st century.” Ramaswamy was rude and brash, claiming that he was “the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for.” Like Trump in 2016, he promised to “drain the swamp,” reminding us that the politics of resentment is alive and well.

Trump noticed. Right after the debate, Trump proclaimed on his Truth Social site that Ramaswamy had “a big WIN in the debate.”

There were plenty of boos, too. Chris Christie was booed for saying that he would not support Trump because “someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct. Whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States.”

More chilling and harder to understand were the boos Christie got when he condemned Vladimir Putin and his savage invasion of Ukraine. “They have gouged out people’s eyes, cut off their ears and shot people in the back of the head — men — and then gone into those homes and raped the daughters and the wives who were left as widows and orphans. This is the Vladimir Putin who Donald Trump called brilliant and a genius. If we don’t stand up against this type of autocratic killing in the world, we will be next.”

Christie reminded the audience that over 20,000 Ukrainian children “have been abducted, stolen, ripped from their mothers and fathers, and brought back to Russia to be programmed to fight their own families.”

As for the booing he got throughout the night, Christie was philosophical. “That’s the great thing about this country, booing is allowed — but it doesn’t change the truth.”

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