Trump brushed off his comments on women, saying there was no time for total political correctness and it was only Rosie O’Donnell who he called those names.

“No it wasn’t,” Kelly countered. “For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.”

“Oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding. We have a good time. What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.

Trump and Rubio scored prime appearance time on network television Friday morning. But even before the shows started, Trump (or one of his staffers) was on Twitter throughout the night sharply criticizing the Fox News moderating team, who had asked him tough questions about his past support for Democrats and universal health care and his history of belittling and insulting women.

At 3:24 a.m., Trump retweeted a supporter calling Fox News’ Megyn Kelly a “bimbo.” At 3:31 a.m., he called her “overrated” and “angry.” And at 3:59, Trump helped a supporter wondering about Kelly’s “hidden agenda.” GOP pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, who ran a post-debate focus group, was also a target of Trump’s ire. He was labeled a “low-class slob” at 3:28 a.m…

The battle between Fox and Trump marks a turn in their long-standing relationship. For years before this run, the bombastic real estate developer and the cable network have had a symbiotic dynamic, with Trump regularly calling into the morning show “Fox and Friends” and giving his thoughts on politics. Other candidates provided some cover for Trump’s complaints, with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham saying the debate was more like an “inquisition.”

Forty-four percent [of Republican “insiders”] called the controversial real estate mogul the biggest loser of the evening, critiquing everything from his refusal to rule out a third party run, to perceived misogynistic comments to his acceptance of single-payer health care in other countries.

“Trump is an egomaniacal thug and everyone who never watched The Apprentice now knows that, too,” an Iowa Republican charged.

“What was his worst response: third party, chauvinism, single-payer, or bankruptcies?” railed a New Hampshire Republican, who like all participants was granted anonymity in order to speak freely. “His limited number of supporters can’t look the other way on this stuff forever.”

“Trump came across as peevish in his refusal to support the victor of the primary process,” said another New Hampshire Republican. “As a Republican I was proud of all the candidates on the platform with the exception of Trump.”

From the moment Brett Baier gave Trump the deadly question on a third-party run, I knew that for ordinary Republicans the night was over. It was clear to everyone outside of his small base of ravenous, furious devotees that no one and nothing comes before the Donald’s galactic-scale ego. For all the fury at his base, this is still a Republican primary, with Republican voters, who are selecting a Republican nominee. That answer was a poison pill that the World’s Greatest Negotiator swallowed like a chump.

As the night progressed, Trump’s answers became more incoherent, discursive, and blustery. For all the Trump claims that he speaks the truth and avoids political correctness, the word vomit in response to every direct policy question showed the Donald isn’t worthy of being on the stage because he blew even the easy questions. In the course of it, he embraced single-payer health care, boasted about his bankruptcies, and bragged about his lavish corruption. He also threatened a debate host, which set a new reality-TV low point for even his low standards of public vulgarity.

The [Donald Trump Reality Distortion Field], however, is strong. Early in the debate there were tweets that Trump should simply buy Fox News and fire Megyn Kelly. As I predicted, his rabid fans declared Trump as having an absolute debate victory. The greatest victory in history.

If anyone was confused about Trump’s motives before last night, they have no excuse to remain so today. He is in this for himself. It was a fact demonstrated by his refusal to rule out a third-party bid or his insistence that he would only support the Republican Party’s presidential nominee if he were that nominee. He demonstrated no policy knowledge – indeed, he was proudly ignorant of the affairs of statecraft. Trump was rude, boorish, and indignant that his crudeness was subject to questioning by the moderators. His embrace of unalloyed liberalism just a few years ago fully exposed the celebrity candidate’s opportunism.

Yes, the majority of Trump’s support comes not from an admiration for his policy positions but his style. His supporters think he upsets the apple cart, and they so deeply resent that apple cart. But these individuals are now clinging to an ideal that has been thoroughly dispelled. Trump backers in the grassroots, and those in conservative media outlets who would enable their self-delusion are embracing a series of category errors. They mistake rudeness for self-assuredness. They confuse incivility for resolve. The see pugnacity and presume efficacy.

At a certain point, coddling Trump supporters and trying to understand their grievances becomes a futile enterprise. When a loved one is making a terrible mistake that will eventually do them great harm, the priority is not to preserve their fragile self-image. The priority is to save them from themselves, regardless of how bitterly they will resent your efforts. For some Trump backers, no amount of contradictory information will dissuade them from their self-destructive course. For most, however, the carnival barker was exposed last night for what he was. What’s more, the members of his own party exposed him.

Just the other day, Obama asserted that “Iranian hard-liners” were “making common cause with the Republican caucus.” The White House transcript reports that his audience greeted this calumny with “laughter and applause.”

All this helps explain why Trump appeals to some conservatives and Republicans. Having endured this kind of abuse for years, why shouldn’t they be attracted to a candidate who seems willing and able to fight back in kind?

But that is a dangerous temptation. For one thing, Obama did not get elected in 2008 by out-snarking the competition but by projecting a thoughtful, temperate mien. Dropping the mask—“you’re likable enough, Hillary”—might have cost him the New Hampshire primary.

Obama’s performance as president should be enough to warn anyone—especially conservatives and Republicans—off from the temptation to put an insult comic in the White House.

It might not be paranoid of Cohen to worry that there are powerful forces out to get his boss [Trump]. Consider the case I made yesterday for why Trump’s candidacy is eventually doomed: Most importantly, the Republican Party is vehemently opposed to his nomination, a wee bit of a problem for Trump since it’s the Republican Party’s nomination to bestow. Yes, there are rules that govern the nomination process, but it’s the Republican Party that establishes the rules, interprets the rules and, if it absolutely had to, could change the rules. In the (unlikely) event that Trump survived the campaign long enough to have a mathematical chance at the nomination, influential members of the Republican Party would be expected to coordinate — some might even say conspire — to deny it to him.

The party has a lot of other tricks to deploy before it comes to that, however, including working to influence the tenor of the media coverage of the campaign. Does that mean Fox News is part of the Republican Party’s coordination process? That’s a complex subject. It’s not quite that Fox News is taking orders from the GOP, so much as that they’re an unofficial part of the GOP as a political scientist might (broadly) define the party. Furthermore, large media organizations like Fox News are complex places. There are reports of disagreements between Fox News president Roger Ailes and parent company News Corp.’s executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, about how the network should cover Trump, for instance. There are undoubtedly disagreements among various reporters, anchors and producers within Fox News, which variously produces excellent nonpartisan journalism, explicitly partisan opinion shows and a lot of things in between.

As a Republican candidate for president, though, you’d much rather have Fox News on your side than not.

“I think that the party donors, the party leaders, need to take a deep breath and put down the sharp objects,” Jindal said. “Get away from the window ledges. The reality is this: The voters will decide who our nominee is. They will decide who the president is. Anybody who tries to clear the field, anybody who tries to pick our nominee — there’ll be a backlash against that. I think Donald Trump has tapped into a powerful sentiment amongst voters, the sense that things don’t change in Washington, D.C. no matter who you elect.”

Jindal was giving voice to a new conventional wisdom. There is no obvious upside in shaming Donald Trump. It is safer for a candidate to praise his voters, attack the media and hope that if the Trump piñata bursts, the best candy falls into his lap.

What’s more interesting than any Trump question or answer, though, was the larger dynamic at play. If Fox News has really turned on Trump, it will add a fascinating new twist to the race. Right now, Trump is the dominant candidate in the field because he has exerted a broad appeal to every part of the Republican Party. How might those Republicans react to Fox News—their own network!—aggressively trying to take down their favorite candidate?

To find out, I called Janet Roberts, 69, a nurse in Bellville, Ohio, who participated in last week’s Bloomberg Politics poll and supported Trump (“He has the balls to stand up to the career politicians”). She had agreed to give me her reaction immediately after the debate. When I called, Roberts was furious. “I had more emotion about Fox News tonight than I did about Donald Trump,” she told me. “Those questions were not professional questions. They were bullying. They were set up to purposely make them all look bad. Our country is a mess and I feel like the debate was an example of that. I’m still with Trump.”…

We won’t know for a few more days if other Republicans reacted to the debate as Roberts did. But my guess is that Trump didn’t hurt himself and might even emerge stronger than before. There’s an unspoken accord between Trump and his supporters that Thursday’s debate can only have intensified. Trump rants and raves in language that upsets and scandalizes the establishment. In return, his fans annoy the elite know-it-alls by rallying to him anyway. Together, they raise a big middle finger to everyone. That’s the art of the deal.

Trump was lofted into first place in the Republican polls by his noisy rejection of all the normal rules of diversity politics. He talked about immigration when few other politicians wanted to—and he talked about it in the way almost no other politician does, by insisting that immigration policy should be based upon the interests of the citizens of the United States first and foremost…

If the contest [of diversity politics] is suppressed, it does not vanish. It erupts in ways that are extra-political and anti-political, led by figures who are half-demagogue, half-clown. We’ve seen that happen in Europe. In Italy, for example, the second-largest party in Parliament—the populist protest Five Star Movement—is led literally by a comedian. Trump is bidding for a similar role in the United States.

Such a project probably won’t work over the long run in the United States, for reasons both institutional and cultural. But in the short run, political energy and political dissent have to go somewhere. Fox News alone can’t get rid of Trump. He can’t be exorcised until the discontents that sustain him are given a better and more responsible way to express themselves.

You cannot embarrass Donald Trump. You cannot back him down with questions that make other candidates buckle. And the crowd loves him for it. They love him because he does not back down. The fact that Trump doesn’t back down is the core of Trump-ism. It is the answer to how he will negotiate with the Democrats, with China, with Mexico. He will get what he wants because he doesn’t back down.

Is it lunacy? Sure. But it’s an appealing kind of lunacy. It’s the ultimate Green Lantern Theory of the American Presidency. Candidates always promise that by virtue of their force of character, they will be able to do what their predecessors couldn’t, while making fewer compromises than their predecessors made. It’s what the people want to hear…

Did Donald Trump win the debate? Lose it? I have no idea. it’s not even clear those concepts apply to a candidate like him. By the normal rules of Republican debates, Trump was crushed like a bug. But by the normal rules of Republican presidential campaigns, Trump doesn’t exist. Fox News said their insta-poll showed voters turning against Trump, but who knows? My colleague Jon Allen, who was in the arena, reports that when Trump was first introduced, the applause for him was light compared to other candidates. By the end, he was drawing “uproarious cheers” and had seemed to win over the crowd, at least sentimentally.

But Donald Trump proved something last night. Fox News threw everything they had at him, they did it on national television, and he didn’t flinch. Donald Trump proved that you cannot embarrass Donald Trump. He is a man who lives entirely without shame or self-doubt. It’s like a superpower. And every time he refuses to back down, every time he shows what you can do and say if you have no shame, his supporters thrill to him a little more. After all, if the media can’t stop him, then what chance do the Democrats have? What chance do America’s enemies have?

Trump didn’t get where he is by containing himself, of course. His fans love him, I’ve been told, for “telling it like it is,” however crazy that interpretation of “is” might be. Trump may not have a plan for, say, health care—he has embraced single-payer socialist systems in the past, and recently said he’d replace Obamacare with “something terrific”—but he’s never cowed or apologetic. When his cellphone number was publicly outed this week, he turned his voicemail into a campaign ad. This is the Tao of Trump…

If one lesson comes out of the Tao of Trump, it should be this: Politics is often a farce. Politicians are not our betters. They routinely drop the ball on huge and crucial matters—but somehow we’ve set up a system where they have more and more power over every little corner of our lives.

Is this a call to throw in the towel and simply hope for free helicopter rides? No. Is it a reminder that while you can’t harness the power of spectacular golf course fountains adorned with cherubs and stallions, you can certainly attempt to ride the highest spout? That’s poetic, but no. It is, however, a call for skepticism. On the road to 2016, many candidates will call for more government, more projects, and greater, more centralized control. When this happens, remember the Tao of Trump—and let the buyer beware.

In a Friday afternoon interview with Fox News Radio’s The John Gibson Show, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson said America as we know it will disappear if Donald Trump mounts a third-party run.

“I’m hoping that he will at some point come to an understanding that if he runs as a third-party candidate, he will essentially hand the election to the progressives, who will get two or three Supreme Court picks, and America will be gone as we know it,” Carson said. “I hope he realizes the seriousness of the situation.”