By Sheldon

Indulge me, if you will, in a thought experiment.

Let’s suppose that I’m running for President of the United States, and that I really, really want to win. Further, let’s suppose that I have an opportunity no candidate has ever had before, which is to have an opposing candidate custom-made to my specifications. Naturally, I’m going to do everything I can to put as many foibles and flaws into my opponent as possible because I want to win. I have no intention of being sporting; the objective is a total blowout, a landslide to bury all other landslides.

I’d design my opponent to have no experience in politics, and a string of failures in pretty much everything from business to family life. Ignorance. He’d have to be as dumb as a week-old frankfurter, with no inclination to do anything about it. No knowledge of policy, foreign affairs, or history. He would be dishonest, and he’d brag about being an asshole, make fun of the less fortunate, and dismiss people who on their worst day could run rings around him on pretty much anything. Sexist, racist, and a professed desire to date his own daughter. I’d ensure lots of baked-in rudeness, crudeness, and less culture than an empty yogurt carton. A penchant for stupid remarks and making a fool of himself? Check. Support from the most loathsome people in America, like for example David Duke and Ann Coulter? Check and Check. Self-absorption, braggadocio, and machismo on steroids, crystal meth, and a case of Red Bull? Check, check, and check. Making my dream opponent overweight with bad hair almost seems like overkill, but we’re going for the win, baby; a perfect storm of stupid.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, my made-to-order loser would be almost exactly like Donald Trump.

This raises a deeply disturbing question: given that Trump is all of these things, and so much more, how is it even possible that he is still competitive? I’ll allow that perhaps the news media, in its insatiable lust for an electoral horse race, is hiding a deficit of support the rest of us don’t see. It’s also possible that the Republican party, in an act of existential desperation, is propping him up to make his campaign a “market-driven” phenomenon with no real basis. But apart from that, how is it that someone this bad, this flawed, this astoundingly immoral, dishonest, graceless, stupid person remains in the running?

In an election more firmly coupled to reality, by this point Trump would have been so thoroughly repudiated, deemed so utterly incapable of winning, that he would have quit the race and taken a job as a dishwasher at a truck stop in Lovelock, Nevada.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a more experienced candidate, by far. Also smarter, stronger, unarguably more compassionate, but also inextricably connected with a brand of establishment politics largely responsible for a lot of frustration and pain. At worst, she will be a bad President, instead of all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled into a single vulgar avatar and dipped in nacho cheese.

That said, if Trump wins, the DNC must bear much of the blame for running the ultimate establishment candidate in the most anti-establishment election in living memory (“Populist” Trump is just as much of an establishment candidate as Clinton; he is merely the establishment’s slimy underbelly.). They selected the weakest candidate against Trump to run against Trump. They also passed up an opportunity to render impotent an anti-Hillary machine that the GOP has been preparing for at least a decade, crafting it into an exquisite, razor-sharp weapon. Had they run Sanders, all that preparation would have been for nothing. Alas, they did not.

Clinton is also, to be more than fair, the recipient of a stream of mindless, mostly truthless vitriol and propaganda from the Right. This has only been made worse by a steady effort by the right to bleach thoughtfulness, respect for facts, respect for civility, and intelligent discourse from the social fabric. I believe that Trump is the natural result of a media effort that has subverted the ideal of Eisenhower’s “informed and alert citizenry” that he presciently warned was necessary for the survival of the republic.

But the real blame? Look for the conditions that made it possible for a self-absorbed, brainless asshole to actually win the nomination of a major party. Look at the alternate reality that makes him the best choice, and then look at who and what created that reality. Even if Trump goes down in flames in November, Trumpism is the problem, it’s not going away after November, and it represents an existential threat.