Moral Surrender and Magical Thinking at Another Pointless G.O.P. Debate

If the candidates trying to wrest their party’s presidential nomination from Donald Trump began the Republican debates over three months ago in a spirit of hope, they have plunged since then into a panicked state. A desperate one.

That’s the ugly, nasty place where they spent the fourth and possibly last of those debates on Wednesday night.

In the first minutes, Ron DeSantis accused Nikki Haley of cowering before activists from the left and sanctioning “child abuse” in the form of medical care for transgender minors. He sounded less like a national leader than like a playground bully.