Trump’s hold on voters stems largely from his lack of any filter and from his directness, traits that they don’t see in establishment candidates. So his fellow Republicans’ filtered, indirect approach to him just gives him more power.

And while he should be irrelevant, he’s becoming ever more relevant, because he’s exposing their timidity and caution.

They’re wrong to try to ignore him, because the media won’t do that and because he’s probably going to qualify for the debates.

Looking ahead to the first of them, the conservative pundit George Will bought into the notion of Trump as an ineradicable pest who “says something hideously inflammatory, which is all he knows how to say, and then what do the other nine people onstage do?”

Oh, please. That’s hardly an existential crisis. It’s a prompt for an overdue smidgen of valor.