Roughly 45 minutes before Donald Trump’s campaign would announce on Tuesday that he was skipping Thursday night’s Fox News debate as always giddily tipping the Republican race into chaos in a yet another pique of strategic petulance (or is it petulant strategy?) Ted Cruz was chugging along as usual at a rally in Ottumwa Iowa.

Cruz has a precise meticulous way of speaking that is as regimented as Trump’s is scattershot and freewheeling. Reporters who have attended multiple Cruz speeches have noted with a mixture of awe and alarm how he is able to hit the exact same beats at the exact same points of every speech at every stop in a way unusual even for politicians. His stump speech is deceptively artful in its dull science. You listen to him like you listen to an air conditioner hum always able to imperceptibly move up or down one degree to meet the needs of his audience but never once straying off beat.

It is perfect and unceasing and sort of amazing. The fact that Cruz is a champion debater has been long discussed but it’s always brought up in the context of actual debates. But his ability to stay singularly focused without wavering is a public speaking skill that doesn’t require others on stage with him.

He is simply a machine. During his entire 45-minute speech at Ottumwa’s Bridge View Center he never said the word “um” at all and he only stuttered and stumbled over a word once.

He had his stump speech down cold but in a way that was clearly segmented into chunks and able to move around in his brain and rejiggered as he saw fit. Move the prayer section here shift “ripping up the Iran deal” over there drop in the “investigate Planned Parenthood” right there in the middle.

When taking questions from the audience at this town hall you can almost see his brain click and whirl like a jukebox selecting the correct 45.

When he received an odd question about whether he would “toss those United Nations jerks out of our country” he segued seamlessly into a five-minute anecdote about his time taking on the World Court in the Medellin case like he was reading it off a teleprompter. Cruz’s ability to convert a complicated world into a singular worldview without it ever appearing strained is unerring. It is his oratorical superpower. He is Cruz Bot.

A perfect illustration of this arrived later at the next event in Fairfield when he was able to effortlessly absorb the big news of the evening — Trump’s refusal to take the debate stage with Megan Kelly — and convert it into campaign energy completely seamlessly. Cruz’s speech was almost exactly the same with one addition: A Trump section delivered as effortlessly as if it had been given 100 times before like the rest of it. It included a debate challenge to Trump “mano a mano” that Cruz had apparently come up with in the campaign bus on the way over.

Just like that Cruz had turned a story that had nothing to do with him and made it his; every story about Trump’s decision now includes an item about Cruz and his challenge. Cruz takes in new information processes it and instinctively churns it into part of his travelling roadshow as if it were there the whole time. He is the political Borg.

Cruz was introduced in Ottumwa by Bob Vander Plaats President and CEO of The Family Leader and a kingmaker in evangelical Iowa politics. (He supported Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum the last two cycles two devout men who also happened to win the last two caucuses.)

Vander Plaats had spent the day being hammered by Trump because his endorsement had gone to Cruz and the former gubernatorial candidate spent his introduction pointing out not only Trump’s failings — hammering him for in order boasting about never asking God’s forgiveness belittling John McCain’s time in prison and making fun of a New York Times reporter with a disability — but boosting Cruz as the true Christian conservative candidate in the race.

Vander Plaats showered Cruz with affection calling him a “once in a generation conservative” though it was clear Vander Plaats was still smarting from Trump’s barbs sneaking in “the sanctity of human life is not up for the art of the deal” in the middle of some more Cruz praise.

Cruz and Trump are reasonably lumped together as the “outsider” candidates yet it’s difficult to imagine two more different human beings. Whereas Trump embraces his wacked-out opulence Cruz is dorky in a believable way. His light blue sweater is rumpled and doesn’t quite fit right; his blue jeans are a little too wide and a little too high; his pant cuffs hang sloppily over work boots. (Cruz looks like one of Trump’s accountants albeit the one who is secretly orchestrating his boss’ downfall behind the scenes.) The contrast between Cruz and Rick Perry who gave Cruz his introduction at the Ottumwa town hall was jarring Perry with his bomber jacket and his Joe Maddon glasses and his haunched swagger Cruz with his wonkish inability to quite look normal.

He’s not charming in the way Perry is and his attempts to come across as a regular person are the one flaw in his matrix. He has a bad habit his tell: Right after delivering a line he believe has scored-which is generally every one of them-he bites his bottom lip and emits a silent click of a giggle with a little hop that seems to be his internal voice saying “Nailed it!” It sometimes makes him look like a Muppet Babies version of a supervillain.

But as relaxed as Perry was on stage Cruz is obviously the more accomplished speaker. He clicks into place like an old grandfather clock. He is forceful assured and comfortably simple: The crowd isn’t necessarily inspired by him but they still hang on every word. He may not be loved by people who have worked with him but he knows how to give a crowd like this exactly what it wants. And perhaps most impressive: He’s able to do it in a way that benefits him exclusively.

Perhaps the most artful part of Cruz’s speech is its closing. Cruz quotes from Scripture and-not coincidentally-he turns to Second Chronicles bringing to mind the book of the Bible Trump famously mispronounced as “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians” at Liberty University. Cruz has been making hay of Trump’s mistake for a few days and Vander Platts had mocked him for it earlier as well. This time though Trump didn’t even have to be mentioned. He instead pointed out that 2 Chronicles 7:14 was the verse Ronald Reagan had his hand on when he was sworn into office a second time and then began to recite from memory. By the time he was halfway through the verse the audience began to join him.

In one move Cruz managed to portray himself as humble and regular folk remind Iowans that he is the most devout person in the race position himself as the natural successor to Ronald Reagan and get in a dig at Donald Trump without ever having to say his name. And he even got the audience to sing it along with him. It was a virtuoso work of political theatre — Cruz Bot operating at maximum capacity. It is a most formidable machine.

Bloomberg