This is an opinion column.

There were quips and barbs and a lot of rude yapping over one another, in Tuscaloosa Wednesday night.

Vivek Ramaswamy invited Chris Christie “to walk off the stage, enjoy a nice meal, and get the hell out of this race.”

Ron DeSantis mostly grimaced like a baby who just ate a lemon.

Nikki Haley called Ron DeSantis and Ramaswamy liars.

Christie called Ramaswamy the “the most obnoxious blowhard in America,” which is something coming from a guy from Jersey.

But the loudest voice in Alabama might have sounded off, not on the Tuscaloosa stage, but online Wednesday morning.

“One candidate has already proven he’s more than up for the job – because he’s done the job successfully,” Sen. Katie Britt wrote in an op-ed published hours before the debate. “There is one candidate I know will secure the border — because he’s done it. There is one candidate I know will achieve peace through strength — because he’s done it.”

Before any of the candidates uttered a word on stage, Britt said the quiet part out loud.

“And that’s why President Donald Trump has my endorsement to be our 47th President,” she wrote.

In other words, this debate doesn’t matter.

It’s over.

Trump won already, so y’all can go home.

Someone should have told the hundreds of journalists and 1,100 attendees who showed up in Britt’s old Tuscaloosa stomping grounds that they were there to witness a funeral, not a campaign.

Between the petty insults, interruptions and eye-rolls, there were moments here that mattered — when candidates for the nation’s most important job spoke about housing, immigration, foreign policy and government spending.

And Trump.

“He is unfit to be president,” Christie said. “And there is no bigger issue in this race.”

You don’t have to agree with these candidates to agree that this is important stuff, and America deserves candidates who don’t hide from scrutiny just because they’re ahead.

But according to Britt, and every other Republican member of the state’s congressional delegation, none of it matters. The rest already endorsed Trump months ago.

Everyone on that stage are chickens running circles around the barnyard, not yet aware they’re deceased.

The decline of debate in politics might be a new thing to Americans, but it’s something we in Alabama have grown accustomed to, and no one knows this as well as Britt. When she lagged in the polls during her Senate primary campaign, Britt attacked opponent Mike Durant for weaseling out of a face-off.

But when Britt led Mo Brooks in the GOP runoff, she called such a thing a “circus act” and refused to take part.

Voters did not punish her hypocrisy.

For kicks, Thursday night, I asked her old opponent, Brooks, what he thought of the news.

“Unsurprising,” Brooks texted me. “Britt waits to see which horse is going to win, then bets on it to protect herself.”

To be fair, Brooks predicted the same outcome Britt must have. Trump, he said, would win no matter what happened in Tuscaloosa. Or anywhere else.

“As I’ve been saying in many interviews for a year now, Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee unless he is a convicted felon,” he said. “And even then, the GOP may choose to go with a convicted felon out of concern it is too late to go with anyone else.”

Brooks was no less caustic than he was two years ago, lashing out, still, at Britt for having aligned herself with swing voters and center-left Republicans who don’t care for Trump.

And simultaneously, he seemed to relish in it.

“She chose Trump even though it meant betraying her Democrat and Never Trump voter blocks,” Brooks said. “That’s what happens when you tell voters polar opposite things to get elected.”

There’s an obvious irony to Brooks’s take here. He was against Trump before he was for him and before he was against him, again. And Trump endorsed Brooks before he ditched him for Britt in the 2022 GOP Senate primary.

But he speaks from experience — and with a word of warning.

“Sooner or later the deception comes back to bite you,” Brooks said.