Pictured: Trump campaign prep room

I woke up this morning with a dry throat and a pounding headache, symptoms of a hangover but without the happy memories of drinking the night before. I must be coming down with something, and well I don’t believe in the metaphysical, I don’t doubt that weeks of worry have something to do with it. All the worry leading up to today, where Hillary has to be perfect, and even if she is, Donald Trump could still walk away with an inside shot at becoming the President.

It’s impossible to really put into words how insane it is that we are here. That we are entering the debate wondering if Donald Trump can behave for long enough to convince people he should be President. Of America. There has never been a more dangerous candidate in American history, certainly not one that is this close. This long ago ceased being about politics, and is about the country as a whole. I know that from 2000-2008 some people thought the country was irredeemably mad, and since then a lot of people have felt it was “Taken from them”, in which every word of that formulation is ahistorical. But this isn’t hyperbole. This is a genuinely dangerous moment. We’re at that part in the history book where people reading it say “why are they doing this? Can’t it be stopped?” with the sickening realization that it wasn’t. We’re at that hinge.

So tonight isn’t a question of who will “win”? One person will be manifestly more qualified to be President in every conceivable way. That can’t be questioned by any serious person. The other might be declared a winner because we’re in a period of historical insanity, and those forces have proven irresistible. So we’ll see.

We’ll be live-blogging after the jump. In the meantime, read Pierce and despair and read Scocca and rage.

This cold is making booze sound terrible, but whiskey might be the only cure for what ails me. It might be the only cure for all of this.

Continue reading →