Who won the Trump-Fox News debate showdown?

The spirit of Trump and Trumpism was the dominant force of the evening even without Trump in the room. Ted Cruz reiterated his promise to "carpet bomb" ISIS regardless of the civilian casualty. Marco Rubio archly referred to his desire to bring back torture as a matter of American policy. Asked if he was worried about a rising tide of Islamophobic incidents in the United States, Ben Carson said simply that "we need to stop allowing political correctness to dictate our policies."

Every candidate in the race — even the once sunny and multicultural Rubio — has adopted Trump's essentially dark and pessimistic worldview. There's no sense in this field that the economy is stronger than it was three or seven years ago, and there's no sense that the world beyond America's shores offers anything other than danger.

Had he taken the stage with the rest of the candidates, Trump would have taken hits directly from them. He also would have had to stand by while they took shots at one another. They did just that: Cruz took shots at Rubio, Rubio took shots at Cruz, Bush took shots at Rubio, and Rand Paul took shots at everyone.

By skipping the debate, and letting the rest of the candidates argue among themselves, Trump avoided any potential damage—and he made it harder for the other contenders, especially Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich, to build on whatever momentum they might be accumulating as the key tests approach.

The debate illuminated the vacuum at the heart of the Republican Party that has been filled by Trump. None of the candidates have the combination of smarts, charisma, and backbone that leading the country usually requires. Their massive cave-in on immigration, a sop to their nativist base, was the clearest example of their abdication of responsibility to govern, but foreign policy, where everyone pledged to kill ISIS deader than the other, but nobody said how, was a close second. Trump's absence is likely to make GOP hearts grow fonder. At any rate, nobody did anything to stop his momentum on Thursday night.

Political observers have been waiting for Rubio's breakout moment, and many predicted that he'd have it at this debate. He didn't. Put frequently on the defensive, he reverted to lines he'd used before and nuggets from his stump speech, and he kept returning to ISIS and military might, military might and ISIS. He came across as overly programmed, one-dimensional and itchy to go to war.

Cruz had his worst debate at a time when polls suggest he's fallen well behind Trump in Iowa. Unless organizing can make up the shortfall, he needs to make something happen in the few days left. But instead of commanding the stage and hammering the absent front-runner, Cruz turned in a sloppy performance consisting of flat jokes, whining to the moderators, whining to the moderators as a set up for flat jokes, and taking substantive poundings from his rivals—and from Fox News itself. ... Cruz on Thursday night wasn't the dominating presence he needed to be. He was just another one of the people losing to Donald Trump.

If you had any doubt about how much Donald Trump is in Jeb's head, this debate should have cleared it up. The former Florida governor was, from the get go, more relaxed and more forceful in this Trump-less debate than he has been in the previous six debates where Trump was included. He owned his family's political legacy unapologetically. He fought Rubio to a draw in an immigration back and forth. He regularly was the only candidate – aside from Paul -- who answered the questions asked of him. Jeb is still a somewhat (ok, very) awkward candidate -- his halting closing statement was painful – who doesn't really like going on the attack. But, without Trump looming over him, Bush looked positively presidential.>

Maybe Donald Trump's absence gave Bush a confidence boost — or at least permitted him to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps Bush, with little to lose at this point, relaxed. Or maybe he is just more polished after months of campaigning. Whatever the reason, he spoke with more conviction and dominated the stage at several points in the debate. And he used some of those moments to bring policy specifics and high principles into an otherwise dismal conversation.

... the Fox crew ran a strange debate: They asked very few questions about the frontrunner; they queued up flip-flop highlight reels for some candidates, but not others; they paid homage to liberal shibboleths like climate change and Kim Davis; they devoted time to silly YouTube question about America's supposed climate of Islamophobia from a Bernie Sanders supporter.

The result was something of a muddle, with none of the candidates prosecuting the case against Trump. Instead, they all acted as if they were in an interregnum which had nothing to do with the campaign both behind it and in front of it. It's as if they thought that because Trump was gone for a night, he was vanquished from the field. This seems like a terrible miscalculation.

After days of being beaten up by the Trump forces, she showed she is a sharp, credible journalist who is willing to ask tough questions and hold the candidates accountable for their prior statements. The video montages and prior records of the candidates were fair game and she forced them to answer.

There has rarely been a debate moderator who has come under as much scrutiny as Kelly has during the course of this campaign. Despite all of that negative attention, Kelly showed why she is the face of Fox News on Thursday night. She was pointed, tough and well versed on the issues. And, more important to me? She showed her sense of humor and a willingness to not take herself too seriously. That she performed so well with so many eyes on her speaks incredibly highly of her abilities.

It might have been interesting to watch Trump's grimaces and facial contortions as his own flip-flop reel played. But he avoided awkward questions on his own, far-longer list of substantive reversals. Standing alone on stage at his veterans' event across town, though, Trump appeared equally diminished by the absence of his rivals. He brought Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee up to join him, before yielding the podium to veterans for half an hour. The other cable-news networks cut away from their live coverage, and the rally wound down to its anti-climactic end while the debate remained in full swing.

Could the consequence of the debate be to begin the deflation of the Trump balloon? I'll grant that I may be indulging in wishful thinking, but I think so. If you were an undecided Iowa voter, or a leaner one way or another, I think you saw something to like in one or more of the candidates on the stage. I don't think you recoiled from the spectacle and said, "I want Donald." The national media is enraptured with the narrative of The Triumph of Trump, so they'll want to say that he was the winner in absentia. But I think for actual Republican voters, especially in Iowa, he was simply in absentia. And I don't think absence made the heart grow fonder. I suspect absence made the heart start to question why it was interested in Trump in the first place.