So what’s next? All the polls I’ve seen have Trump way ahead in New Hampshire, where the world will descend on February 9th to gape and ogle before decamping for points south until the cycle starts again in four years. But now that the game is really afoot, has Donald Trump peaked?

I suspect it will be uphill work for Cruz in New Hampshire. The Granite State, saddled with its own migrant invasion not from Syria but from Massachusetts and other casualties of the liberal agenda, has gone from fierce independence to pajama-boy feminization over the last couple of decades. Liberals fled to New Hampshire on account of its low taxes, and then demanded all the government services and nanny-state interventions that had transformed their home states into high-tax, low productivity basket cases. Even as I write, the state motto is being revised from “Live Free or Die” to “Give Free or Die.” (I’m not sure that’s quite official yet, but it’s already true in fact.)

How will the Donald Trump circus play in New Hampshire? He was belligerently boisterous when asked: “My brand is doing great,” he insisted. His “brand”? The term is apt, for “brand” is precisely what Trump has, and it’s all he has. To appreciate what that means, ask yourself if James Madison or Abraham Lincoln or FDR or Ronald Reagan would have said any such thing about themselves. Donald Trump has starred in a reality TV show. Now he wants to move it to a bigger stage. It’s entertaining, after a fashion, but just how seriously will the American people, even the overbred snowflakes who now huddle together in New Hampshire, take him? “The crowd roared,” a story in the Washington Post reported, “when he cursed as he pledged to aggressively target Islamic State terrorists. ‘If we are attacked, somebody attacks us, wouldn’t you rather have Trump as president if we’re attacked?’ he asked. ‘We’ll beat the [expletive] out of them.'”