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Ted Cruz used his closing statement at Saturday night’s Republican Presidential debate, in Manchester, New Hampshire, to praise, in sonorous terms, his own political bravery. He had been told that opposing ethanol subsidies would be “political suicide”; he stood up anyway, and Iowa’s caucus-goers had put “country and our children above the cronyism and corporate welfare” to vote for him. It was a classic Cruzian set of lines, rendering his supporters as worshippers and his opponents as people of bad will. Cruz had just wrapped up when Donald Trump threw out an alternative explanation for Cruz’s victory in Iowa.

“That’s because he got Ben Carson’s votes, by the way,” Trump said. He was referring to the Cruz campaign’s dirty tricks in Iowa, particularly a concerted effort to persuade caucus-goers that Carson had dropped out of the race. (The assumption was that Cruz, a religious conservative like Carson, would be the second choice for many of them.) Trump half-sneered at Cruz, but it was, by his standards, fairly lightly done. He hadn’t gone after Cruz much personally during the debate, even when the moderators, ABC News’s Martha Raddatz and David Muir, began the proceedings by reading Trump a quote from Cruz saying that he, Trump, might drop nuclear weapons on Denmark. Indeed, Trump, despite a solid dose of talk about wall-building and oil-seizing, left most of the job of attacking his opponents to the others. They obliged, with the result that this Republican debate, like the previous one, and like the Iowa caucus, failed to winnow the field. Some contenders who had been looking strong looked weaker (Cruz, Marco Rubio), some of the weaker ones appeared stronger (Chris Christie, John Kasich, Jeb Bush), and Ben Carson, who seemed to miss his cue as the candidates took the stage, pledged that he would stay in the race almost as a sacred duty. And that duty included dealing with Ted Cruz.

“I’m not going to use this opportunity to savage the reputation of Senator Cruz,” Carson said, but only, he suggested, because Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have wanted him to. Carson proceeded, in his quiet way, to do so anyway. How could anyone think that he would just walk away from Iowa, when volunteers had been working so hard for him there, and one had died? (This was a young man named Braden Joplin, who was killed in a car crash.) “Who would do something like that?” Carson said. In the cartoon version, giant arrows would have appeared, pointing to Cruz. Carson continued, “It gives us a very good example of certain types of Washington ethics. Washington ethics. Washington ethics basically says: if it’s legal, you do what you need to do in order to win.”

“Senator Cruz?” Muir said. Cruz began by saying that he was awed by Carson’s life story, and was sorry about what had “transpired.” But rather than leave it at that, he launched into a recitation of “the facts” which wasn’t at all factual. Basically, he blamed CNN, saying that his campaign had just passed on an inaccurate story that the network had tweeted at 6:30 P.M., half an hour before the caucuses began, and “didn’t correct” until 9:15, when they had closed. As I wrote earlier this week, Cruz’s alibi is simply false. (CNN put out an angry rebuttal after the debate.) Carson claimed the privilege of speaking, since he’d been mentioned—a debate rule that encourages volleying—and used it to say, firmly, that Cruz had the “timeline” wrong. There was a tweet within a minute of the first one removing any possible ambiguity. “Everybody can see what happened and you can make your own judgment,” he said. In the debate, Carson would return to the ethical problems with “the Washington way” twice more. It was an odd mistake, on Cruz’s part, to tell a lie in front of the person whose abeyance on this issue he needs if he is to move on, especially since Carson, who is usually somewhat cryptic, had hurt written on his face.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the stage, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush both went at Marco Rubio, but Christie did the most damage by far. (John Cassidy has the whole brutal story.) He got the audience to notice that Rubio had repeated a line about how “Barack Obama knows exactly what he’s doing” two times, almost verbatim; Rubio responded by repeating the line two more times, though the final rendition was jumbled.

Trump, again, didn’t really participate in the Rubio takedown. The other candidates seem to have become franchisees of Trump’s brand of personal attack. He just sits back and collects the political equivalent of licensing fees. What may be more damaging to the G.O.P. is that Trump’s ideology seems to have been franchised as well. The hyper-nationalism, the insinuations of treachery at the highest level of government, the disdain for civil rights and international accords, the fetishizing of military force, and the raw bigotry—all have somehow become part of the Republican Party’s normal back-and-forth. Rubio’s talking point, for example, was striking in its repetition, but all the more so in its content. When he said that Obama knew what he was doing, he meant that “all this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate. This is a President that’s trying to redefine this country.” And: “Barack Obama views America as this arrogant global power that needed to be cut down to size. … It’s one of the reasons why he had betrayed Israel.” Christie, who wants to play the grownup with Rubio, said of America’s hostage-taking enemies, “They do not understand anything but toughness and strength.” (A few days ago, he said of Hillary Clinton, “I’ll beat her rear end.”) Cruz now talks about building a wall along the border, and he made a joke about getting Trump to build it. It fell flat, as did another joke that Cruz told about bombing. He said that he had heard about a facility called “Jihadi University,” which would be reduced to “rubble” if he were President—“Although I will say this. I would be willing to wait until freshman orientation before launching those bombs.”

Bush, at least, when asked if he, like Trump, would bring back torture, in the form of waterboarding, said, “No.” Cruz said that he would, although he thought that the torturers should be senior people—those at “low levels” handled it badly. Rubio said that he would want there to be secret interrogation methods, too. And he was unhappy that there were so few people in Guantánamo. Moderation is relative in today’s G.O.P. Bush, asked if he thought that too absolute a position on abortion might alienate voters, said that he was in a “sweet spot” relative to Rubio, who believes that abortion should be banned in all circumstances except when the life of the mother is in danger. Bush said that he’d also be for allowing exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Christie said that he would, too, and bragged about defunding Planned Parenthood in New Jersey.

The closest that Trump came to a one-on-one fight was with Bush, who attacked him, fairly vigorously, on eminent domain, which Trump had tried (and failed) to use to get a woman in New Jersey to sell her home so that he could build a parking lot. When Trump replied that eminent domain was what made private-sector projects like the Keystone Pipeline—which Bush supports—possible, Bush seemed to deny that it was a private project. “Shusshh!” Trump said to Bush at one point, adding, “He wants to be a tough guy.” When some in the room booed, Trump explained to the television audience that a lot of the people filling the seats in the venue were campaign donors. One of Trump’s main offers to his supporters is that he will tell them how things really work, and where the rigging is. Otherwise, his rivals backed away. Even Cruz wouldn’t repeat the “Denmark” line to his face.

In the New Hampshire polls, Trump had been at about thirty per cent; Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, and Bush were clustered between nine and fifteen per cent, with Rubio pulling ahead. Christie probably had the best night of all, but he is polling at five per cent, and so even doubling that number would just leave him in the crowded middle. (Carson is at three.) Kasich spoke well about the vulnerable and the need to create jobs, making it a good night for all three governors, and the debate may help with those already inclined to like him (or who are just desperate for someone who seems stable) at a moment when multiple outcomes seem possible. Kasich was also the least caught up in the debate’s many micro-vendettas. But he never quite shook the detachment he exhibited in the debate’s botched opening, when, after several cues were missed, he seemed to hang back and hide in the curtains.

That missed-cue pileup had begun when Carson didn’t hear his name, and stood in the wings. Just as a stagehand was urging him forward, Cruz’s name was called, and Carson pulled back as Cruz hurried past him. Trump, though, stopped and stood with Carson, and in doing so he kept the bizarre from seeming pathetic. Trump remained there, chatting, as Rubio and Bush loped by, until his own name was emphatically called again. Then he walked on the stage slowly, and started talking about Muslims (“we have a problem”), immigrants, building up the military, and how, among the candidates, he had the best temperament of all.