Taking a question about whether Donald Trump can use his anti-establishment points to take control of the race following the debate, Charles Krauthammer said that the main result of the debate is that Trump slowed the loss of Republican support:
What is clear is that he prevented the crash last night. He was headed — well, to mix metaphors — over the edge because the party was deserting him. All those defections: the governors, senators, and members of Congress. Remember, when Nixon resigned it was not right after the Supreme Court had ordered him to release the tapes. It was when Barry Goldwater and the delegation from the Congress went to Nixon and said, “It’s over, you have got to resign.” And the next day he announced his resignation.
This was a flight to the exits, and it’s clear that the debate steadied him in the sense that that appeared to have been stemmed. It looked as if, he had stopped the bleeding. Now he’s lost a lot of time, he’s behind — he had to use this. It’s like using a timeout in the NFL: He used a debate that he could have used to close the gap to simply hold the campaign together, which he did. What’s surprising is, having stanched the bleeding — that’s the third metaphor — Ryan comes out and he rips off the bandage.
He gives permission to others to resume the flight, the exit. And that creates — I think you are absolutely right, and this is the civil war, this is the split we are going to see between now and Election Day, and I think it makes it almost impossible to win if you’re a Republican running for president, because either people are going to be angry on the so-called establishment side or on the Trump side, and either way, if you are a senator or a congressman and you are caught in the middle, you could lose a substantial amount of Republican support.
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