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By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

We’ve spent the past few days deconstructing what happened at the Iowa caucuses. I’m still stuck on what happened before:

We saw just how faithfully the Republican Party now worships at the church of nasty. Just how fully it genuflects before the great god of nastiness, Donald Trump.

I don’t mean by supporting and voting for him, though there’s that. I mean by idolizing and emulating him. By accepting as catechism his perverse moral logic. By taking one of his favorite words as an optimal mode of conduct and a set of marching orders. He called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” back in the day. Just this week, he called the jurist presiding over one of his civil trials “a nasty judge” and “a nasty man.” And you know how it is with Trump, whose behavior is textbook projection: When he’s attaching an epithet to you, he’s making an admission about himself.

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis got the “nasty” memo. In Iowa, they were campaigning, at least theoretically, as alternatives to Trump, so you would have expected them to be less, well, nasty. But in their one-on-one debate last week, with the clock ticking and their odds of winning the Republican presidential nomination growing tinier and tinier, what they did above all was show just how mean to each other — just how gratuitously, performatively nasty and Trumplike — they could be.

DeSantis used his first comments in the first minutes of that debate to pivot from himself to Haley and attack her as a liar. Across the next two ugly hours, she called him a liar on auto-repeat. It was incessant. It was emblematic. Both DeSantis and Haley wagered that in their party today, remade in Trump’s image, that behavior wouldn’t seem cheap and desperate. It would seem gutsy. It was a credential of leadership.

Two memorable articles published just before the caucuses demonstrated how thoroughly that thinking has animated DeSantis’s approach to politics in general and his presidential bid in particular. In The Times, Nicholas Nehamas detailed all the conventionally inspirational bits of DeSantis’s life story — and how seldom, if ever, DeSantis makes mention of them.

“If there were ever a time for Mr. DeSantis to tell more of his bootstrap biography it would be now, as his hopes of a strong finish in the Iowa caucuses, and perhaps his entire presidential campaign, seem to be ebbing away,” Nehamas wrote. That DeSantis didn’t do so says something about his coldness, but it also says something about his assessment of his party and its voters. He put his chips on meanness and mercilessness, listing all the enemies he’d slain as governor of Florida, all the enemies he’d slay if promoted to the White House.

That came across in the other article, an account by Sarah Larson in The New Yorker of his final-hours campaigning in Iowa. At one stop, Larson wrote, “he leaned hard on the Mafia-esque assertion that in Florida he had ‘kneecapped’ E.S.G. — investing that takes into account environmental, social and corporate-governance issues.” At another, he railed against electric vehicles and vowed to secure a line-item veto so he could do away with “promoting transgenderism in Bangladesh” before “decrying Brooklyn’s sheltering homeless migrants in a school,” Larson added. Get your ooey-gooey inspiration elsewhere. Get your down-and-dirty spite right here.

Or from Vivek Ramaswamy.........

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