“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card,” Trump said during a news conference at Trump Tower. “And the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”

The new and more Presidential Donald Trump:

“I haven’t quite recovered, it’s early in the morning, from her shouting that message. And I know a lot of people would say you can’t say that about a woman, because, of course, a woman doesn’t shout, but the way she shouted that message was not– ooh, I just, that’s the way she said it. I guess I’ll have to get used to a lot of that over the next four or five months. -On Morning Joe

Yes…and well, we’ll all have to get used to a lot of things. Even those who understood early on- though not early enough- that the Trump phenomenon was something real and dangerous never quite came around to emotionally reconciling ourselves to his nomination. It’s one thing to imagine the hypothetical; it’s another to imagine one of the worst people in America in front of a cavernous arena, filled with fulsome county clerks and backwater ward heelers, decked in their finest patriotic hats, yowling his name every time he mentions “crooked Hillary” and how he’s going to win, as a 200-foot banner with his grotesquely swollen visage unfurls behind him, and the lights around the stadium syncopate in flashes of his name, as he snarls and preens and basks in his Roman glory while the band plays a discordant national anthem, the kind you’d hear if it was interpreted by Stravinsky as he drove a bus straight into a mountain…

Terrible, horrible visions, a nightmare of democracy, and now all be inevitable. His managing to get over 50% in the last six states shows a momentum and acceptance and a rejection of Ted Cruz. Cruz might still compete in a couple of states, and might try to prove that he’s somehow the will of the people, the only way he knows how- by lying– but it is essentially too late. There can still be political fixes, and the conventions will be ugly, but no matter what we’ve entered a howling wilderness, brought on by greedy politics and the dissolution of the Republican Party into a million little hateful camps, driven by anger and institutionalised racism and racist anti-institutionalism. It’s where the broken come not to feel whole, but to break something else. That’s the Trump appeal.

Read more on why you should support Hillary Clinton, even if you don’t like her…

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