While billionaire Donald Trump is a reality TV star known for making headlines with his outspoken antics, there’s also a “political brilliance” fueling his meteoric rise in the Republican presidential race, Fox News anchor Bret Baier said Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

“His biggest applause line always is when he says he’s self-funding, and he’s out of the clutches and the grasp of these lobbyists that control decision-making in Washington. He taps into both parties’ angst about money in politics and how much their losing their say because big money has control over some of these politicians,” Baier said. “There is an entertainment side to Donald Trump, but there is a political brilliance side to Donald Trump that I think more and more people are realizing.”

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And if one of the other candidates is going to make a real move, he or she will have to steal a page from The Donald’s playbook, he said. “If it’s not going to be Trump, the person who is going to be the nominee is going to have to tap into the same thing Trump is tapping into.”

As the CNN panelists who will fire questions at Republican presidential candidates Wednesday night are putting the final touches on their queries, Baier, who helped moderate the first debate, offered his predictions for how the night might go.

“I think they’re going to try to focus on policy,” Baier said, noting that CNN host Jake Tapper and his panel will likely try to get the candidates to move beyond the generalities of their platforms. “It will be interesting to see how Tapper manages to get candidates going after each other … I think people want to hear solutions.”

As always, Donald Trump figures to dominate the attention at the debate. Baier suggested that the days are over when experts write Trump off as a diversion before the real campaign starts.

Baier said it is good for candidates to get “out of their comfort zone” and take their message to audiences who are not used to hearing it.

Referencing Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ appearance at conservative Liberty University on Monday, Baier said it is good for candidates to get “out of their comfort zone” and take their message to audiences who aren’t used to hearing it. He said he has been trying to get Sanders, the Socialist senator from Vermont, to come on his show to debate one of the GOP candidates head to head.

“I think that those kinds of things, that get out of the normal singing to the choir, is really important for big issues,” he said.

Ingraham agreed: “I just think people would eat that up morning, noon and night because of how crowded these debates are.”