Carly the Conqueror

The second Republican presidential debate, main-stage version, ran as long as this season’s finale of The Bachelorette—but, unlike that prior piece of epic reality television, no single candidate emerged at the end with a bright red rose. Another difference: while The Bachelorette finale flew right by, or so I am told, the GOP debate was such that, as the always-waggish Alex Wagner suggested on Twitter, everyone who endured the entire thing deserved “to reward themselves with a long toke of Jeb Bush’s 40-year-old pot.”

The debate’s format was designed to “highlight differences” among the 11 candidates who made the top-tier cut, and moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN and Hugh Hewitt of Salem Radio did their best to stir the pot. And indeed there was conflict aplenty at the Ronald Reagan presidential library, with Donald Trump, as expected, at the center of it. Pretty much everyone (save Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich) threw at least a little, and often more than a little, shade at Trump. The question is whether any of the attacks will stick, or if we’ll find in the days ahead that he remains the Teflon Don.