This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on Feb. 25, 2016 Fri­day, after Thursday night’s GOP primary de­bate,* we cer­tainly won’t know wheth­er Don­ald Trump’s up­ward tra­ject­ory has been fun­da­ment­ally changed, but we ought to have an idea wheth­er the cir­cum­stances re­quired to stop Trump are start­ing to de­vel­op. Will the oth­er can­did­ates choose to take the fight to Trump rather than fight­ing amongst them­selves? Will the me­dia make Trump ac­tu­ally an­swer ques­tions? Fri­day will be “the tell.” We know that Ted Cruz is not above mix­ing it up, but giv­en the re­cent flaps over cam­paign tac­tics, will he need to pull his punches or will he con­tin­ue to go all out? We can prob­ably as­sume that John Kasich will play Mr. Ro­gers again, mak­ing nice, so no threat to the Trump jug­ger­naut. All the talk lead­ing in­to the de­bate was that Marco Ru­bio would not find the co­jones to really go after Trump. The an­swers on Fri­day morn­ing to those ques­tions will be a good in­dic­at­or of where this is go­ing. We’ll also know wheth­er the me­dia, in this

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