After 2012 I believed any candidate smart enough to run against all this insanity would do well. In early 2016, when I saw that Trump was doing exactly this, I had a flash of insight that he was going to be president. In the first feature I wrote about Trump, I talked about how he was looking “unstoppable,” and explained: It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.
