I don’t think the recent former Democrat Donald Trump is now a conservative, or pro-life. He may not even intend to build a wall on the Rio Grande. I think he has craftily figured out what voters want to hear, and he is spouting it with fingers crossed, already eyeing a pivot to the principle-free, crony capitalist muddled middle establishment center the moment the coast is clear. But last night the GOP debate was in major ways diminished by his absence.

No, I didn’t miss Trump’s petulant puckered mouth or Mussolini chin-bobs. (Seriously, go back and watch archive footage of the Italian dictator, the way he would bounce his chin up and down after delivering an applause line — Trump does it at similar points in his speeches.) It was good to see a stage full of mostly rational adults, without a clinical narcissist in their midst, debating the details of national policy. The earlier debates, with Trump at the center, were like watching Wimbledon, except with beagles instead of ball boys rushing in during matches and running off with the ball. This debate had no beagles.

But it also wasn’t quite tennis. At some points it seemed more like badminton, played by a gaggle of veal-colored Andover lads on some lawn in Greenwich, Connecticut back in 1953, when our country was wealthy and orderly, for stakes like “Loser has to trim the crusts off the cucumber sandwiches!” With Trump off stage, sulking in his tent like a draft-dodging Achilles mobbed by veterans, the GOP establishment’s mass delusion descended like a pink cloud over parts of the stage. In particular, we were treated to the spectacle of a member of the Bush family reassuring a corn-fed Muslim Bernie Sanders fan — whom Fox News(!) dug up as a questioner — that America would address the serious problem of Islamophobia, because it’s so very important that we be “welcoming.”

Millions of Americans must have in unison hurled crumpled-beer cans at their screens. They remember San Bernardino, the work of that charming young Muslim couple whom our immigration system — set up by the likes of Jeb Bush — so kindly “welcomed.” They know what happened in Paris. They know what is happening in Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Britain with the “helpless women and children” those countries’ elites claimed they were welcoming — who somehow turned out to be 80 percent military-age male colonists fond of forming rape-mobs and joining ISIS.

Thus it was that during a nationally televised GOP debate, on a conservative network, a Republican candidate openly buys into the political sham of “Islamophobia,” and promises some sullen socialist Muslim college girl that America will do better. How about Islam doing better? How about millions of moderate Muslims publicly renouncing their religion’s overt support for religious conquest, rank misogyny, polygamy and sharia? That’s what Trump would have said, and he would have been right.

Bush owned up to supporting amnesty, and treated the issue as if it were a no-brainer moral imperative, even rebuking Marco Rubio for backing down from his Gang-of-Eight deal with the Democrats. Rubio shot back, amidst some solid-sounding (no doubt focus-group-tested) language about our national sovereignty, that amnesty wasn’t politically possible given the public mood. But he suggested that down the line, once we’d secured the border, anything is possible. He spoke in a simple code to Jeb, the open-borders donors and GOP business elites with whom he has long competed with Bush for support: Throw the rubes their red meat for goodness sake, Jeb, or neither of us will get the nomination!

It was dispiriting to see the soundest candidate on the stage, Ted Cruz, bob and weave and double down on the issue of “legalization,” rather than simply admit that while his position has always been to the right of Rubio, he has changed his mind about offering legal, non-citizen status to illegal immigrants — and now he sees that it was never a good idea. Cruz seems convinced that making this simple admission will hand the nomination to Donald Trump — even though Trump to this day actually favors amnesty, but only after the U.S. spends billions deporting 12 million people so it can spend the same amount or more bringing them right back in again.

Cruz’s tactics weaken the impact of the strongest attack point on Rubio: the Florida Senator’s appalling Gang-of-Eight bill with left-wing Democrats, one that didn’t just offer a blanket amnesty — which he’d campaigned against, running for Senate, as Megyn Kelly proved through a series of video clips of Rubio campaigning for the Senate — but greatly hiked legal immigration totals, importing still more low-skill workers to compete with hard-pressed blue collar Americans. You know, the people who for some strange reason are polling for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is wrong about a lot of things, and lying about some of the others. But he doesn’t grovel before the Social Justice Warriors who are terrorizing our campuses and mau-mauing the media. He doesn’t telegraph, as Rubio does, that on immigration he’s merely soothing the voter’s feelings, waiting for them to calm down — maybe after some increased border security — so that an amnesty can be implemented, along with vast increases in legal immigration.

No wonder that in polls, Trump is running away with the ball. Or should I say the shuttlecock?