The Republican party is running out of ideas on how to stop Donald Trump. And it is running out of time. In three weeks, or even two, the race could be effectively over — with Trump so far ahead in delegates that the donors and activists backing the other candidates give up and crawl to Trump hat in hand, or else sit back and sulk. In that likely scenario, many who snarked at Chris Christie as Donald Trump’s “hostage” would find themselves envying him, as the front-runner in the race for table scraps.

Meanwhile, Trump seems to have stopped even bothering to court conservatives: At the last minute, he canceled his appearance at the right-wing powerhouse conference CPAC — though after his sputtering rage at last night’s debate, some might attribute that decision to performance anxiety.

Some of us got our hopes up a little when Mitt Romney, elder statesman, emerged from his fortress of solitude yesterday to address the Trump phenomenon. Whatever you think of Romney as candidate, he is a good family man with an honest business record. He has all the character virtues that Trump likes to brag that he lacks. Romney addresses substantive issues. He speaks in complex sentences, using multi-syllabic words. But when it comes to stopping Trump, that’s just the problem. Well-meaning and intelligent as Romney’s speech really was, it flew right over the heads of the people wearing Trump hats and Homer Simpson t-shirts.

The speech began with some less than stellar lines, which reinforced Romney’s image as a technocrat. Trump voters are unlikely to swoon at Romney’s evocation of America’s “technology engines” and “innovation dynamic.” (Does Romney mean he has an army of killer robots who will prevent a Trump transition? If so, he should say so — now that would be exciting!)

After talking for a while about how hopeful and promising America really is, Romney tried to address the concerns of Trump voters, as he imagines them. Romney admitted that despite all our advantages, we do face “real problems and serious challenges,” and even addressed problems that actually interest most Trump supporters: “At home, poverty persists. And wages are stagnant.” But that was about it. Then he launched into a list of issues that could have been lifted from one of Jeb Bush’s old speeches to the Florida Chamber of Commerce: “The horrific massacres of Paris and San Bernardino. The nuclear ambitions of the Iranian mullahs. The aggressions of Putin. The growing assertiveness of China and the nuclear tests of North Korea.”

Sad to say, but Republican voters polling for Donald Trump might never have heard of the Paris massacre; unless they’re deeply interested in Israel, they aren’t worried about Iran’s nuclear ambition; and few outside the Beltway regards Putin as a threat to our security — though they might be wrong — or care much what’s happening in the China Sea’s Spratly Islands. Most still think of North Korea as the punch line to a joke. So anyone leaning to Trump who heard the speech was likely by this point already rolling his eyes, and maybe muttering, “He just doesn’t get it.”

Next they were left to wonder what Romney meant by “improvident choices” whose outcome would be that America’s “prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.” Or maybe they weren’t wondering by this point — they had already changed the channel.

He did turn to issues closer to the hearts of most Trump supporters, but at first it was wrapped in abstractions adroitly calculated to glaze over the eyes of all but the doughtiest of policy wonks:

If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession. A few examples. His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war and that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs and lead entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes to flee America.

Instead of the stick-figure, good-guy/bad guy, us-versus-them, quasi-paranoid talk in which Trump grunts forth his programs, Romney kept on delivering a TED talk:

His tax plan in combination with his refusal to reform entitlements and honestly address spending would balloon the deficit and the national debt. So even though Donald Trump has offered very few specific economic plans, what little he has said is enough to know that he would be very bad for American workers and for American families.

It was only now, well into the speech, that Romney took off his white gloves and started punching — in a way that many observers after the speech would say they wish he had gone after Barack Obama in 2012:

His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them. He inherited his business; he didn’t create it. And whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not.

That was effective because it used Anglo-Saxon words and some specifics. Romney could have continued with the real names and sob stories of actual, real-life, hard-working people who were ground under Trump’s shiny heel. But he didn’t. He went back to policy-speak, pointing out (accurately, but irrelevantly) that Trump’s economic proposals are vague, while his foreign policy instincts violate recent Republican orthodoxy. None of those punches landed.

Romney eventually got back on track, reeling his rhetoric out of the stratosphere:

There’s plenty of evidence that Mr. Trump is a con man, a fake. Mr. Trump has changed his positions not just over the years, but over the course of the campaign. And on the Ku Klux Klan, daily for three days in a row.

We will only really know if he’s a real deal or a phony if he releases his tax returns and the tape of his interview with The New York Times. I predict that there are more bombshells in his tax returns. I predict that he doesn’t give much, if anything, to the disabled and to our veterans. I predict that he told The New York Times that his immigration talk is just that — talk.

There we go — concrete accusations that Trump is a panderer to racists, a liar and a fraud. It is there, and not in Trump’s scoffing at conservative principles, that the nomination might turn. If only Romney had gotten to this stuff sooner and never let up.

It’s Time for a Cuban Knife Fight

Happily, Thursday’s campaign news doesn’t end with Romney. As we’ve seen in the past two weeks and at last night’s debate, Marco Rubio has dropped his years-long civics class schtick, and is going after Trump where he is vulnerable, using language that gets under Trump’s oddly orange skin: On Trump’s business acumen and his character as a man. Rubio has called Trump out as what New Yorkers have long considered him: a scheming, cynical, two-faced crooked businessman who is insecure about his manhood.

Rubio even repeated an old joke from the 1980s: The great Spy magazine used to refer to Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” Trump took that as an attack on his masculine attribute, and responded by sending Spy‘s editors — over and over again — close-up photos of his hands, with commentary written in a gold-inked Sharpie about how large his various body parts really are. (Sorry, people, but you need to know about this odd behavior if you’re considering him for the role of president of the most powerful nation on earth!)

Now make no mistake: This hurts Trump, but also diminishes Rubio. Hitting below the belt has a way of doing that. Since Super Tuesday, that may not matter. Watching Rubio join Ted Cruz in genially double-teaming Trump at the debate, I think I saw what may be going on: Rubio is auditioning for the role of Ted Cruz’s VP pick, and designated attack dog (long an honorable role for vice-presidential candidates). And for those convinced that a President Trump would diminish America, that would be very good news indeed, since Rush Limbaugh is right: A Cruz/Rubio ticket might be the only way to stop Trump.