Ted Cruz isn’t topping the polls or dominating the conversation, but he’s one of the winners of the past few months.

His odds of winning the nomination have increased more than anyone else’s besides Donald Trump, and if you believe (reasonably enough) that Trump isn’t built to last, more than anyone else’s, period.

Let’s review. There was always the danger of Cruz, who made his national reputation on the strength of a misbegotten government shutdown, seeming like too much of a bomb-thrower. That was before it began to look like the Republican Party is open to a candidate only slightly less disruptive than Auguste Vaillant, the 19th-century French anarchist who struck a blow against politics as usual by literally throwing a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies in 1893 (the establishment wasn’t amused — it executed him).

Such is the disgust with the Republican leadership, that there is no longer such a thing as going too far. Cruz could burn John Boehner in effigy, and no one would bat an eye.