As promised, I did not watch the Republican debate last night. I might have done so for a significant amount of money, but I got no offers.

So I’m reading the reviews. The first thing I wanted to know is, did anything significant happen that might change the trajectory of anyone’s campaign? And the answer appears to be, probably not.

Rhonda Santis didn’t catch fire. Early this morning I saw some conservative commentary that labored mightly to put some lipstick on him, but then I read this in National Review of all places, by Christian Schneider.

DeSantis, on the other hand, was shaky throughout. The one-liner-o-matic machine was belching smoke all night, as he tried desperately to resemble an actual human. It is a tough act for the Florida governor — if he were to flame out of this race (and recent results haven’t been good), it means returning to a state where he set a bonfire of bridges on his way to becoming a national candidate. Imagine the pathetic image of poor Ron walking back to his state, gluteus in hand, and having to repair relations with Disney and his university system.

Does DeSantis have any genuine supporters left who aren’t on his campaign staff?

Mr. Schneider of National Review didn’t care for Vivek Ramaswamy, either. “If you listened to what he actually said, Ramaswamy exposed himself as a fraud,” Schneider wrote. “His takes on foreign affairs sound like Wikipedia articles that have been translated from English to Hungarian, then back to English.” But that won’t matter, because the target audience doesn’t care about policy, especially foreign policy. I take it Ramaswamy revealed himself to be an aggressively ignorant asshole, but that’s what the MAGA crowd likes. I’d say he has a shot at being Trump’s new Veep pick, but only if he’s willing to convert from Hinduism to evangelicalism first.

Conversely, Nikki Haley impressed some of the old-school Republicans at National Review, which means the base will continue to ignore her.

At the other end of the scale, I haven’t heard a word about Tim Scott in any of the reviews. I assume he was there. It sounds as if Mike Pence was being more aggressive than usual. Chris Christie was less entertaining than some had hoped. But other than a bump for Ramaswamy I doubt anything was accomplished last night.

Word is that Trump’s pretaped interview with Tucker Carlson had Tucker fantasizing about violence — in particular, Tucker predicted “they” will soon try to assasinate Trump — and Trump basically ignoring Tucker and rambling on about his usual grievances. Tucker also spent time on the pressing question of whether Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. Trump is claiming some huge million-something number of views of the interview, but this Yahoo article explains why counts of “views” on X are meaningless. It appears that the number of people who engaged in any way with the interview is in the hundreds of thousands, but not millions.

Best review I’ve seen is at Talking Points Memo, by David Kurtz. Just go read it.

Trump is still expected to surrender at the Fulton County Jail during prime time this evening.

In other news: It now appears to be official — Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash caused by an intentional explosion, the Associated Press is reporting.  “In all, the other passengers included six of Prigozhin’s lieutenants, along with the three-member flight crew,” the AP says. I guess falling out of high-rise buildings was getting old. .