Before worst comes to worst.

Take it as a given that Captain Thinskin has, in less than three weeks, already lived down to my worst expectations.

In every dimension I can think of — policy, personality, politics, manners, intelligence, competence, vision, humanity, composure, leadership, management, governance (you get the idea) — his administration is a total, and totally terrifying, disaster.

Yesterday’s sideshow, with his attack on Nordstrom’s for dropping his daughter’s clothing line, perfectly encapsulates the insanity that surrounds us.

Sure, it’s hilarious and sad and stupid in a point-and-laugh kind of way. At the same time, it’s a serious-as-a-heart-attack leap beyond plain old conflict of interest that demonstrates just how willing — eager — he is to use the weight of his office to further his own and his family’s business interests: “Spicer’s message was clear — businesses that make decisions cutting against the financial interests of the president and his family will be subject to retribution.”

As Josh Marshall put it, “He recognizes no conflict. Indeed, there isn't one. President Trump is openly using his office to become the billionaire he always wanted to be.” (And don’t worry, his wife is trying to get in on the action as well.)

Just one more of the forays into uncharted territory that have already come to define this surreal era.

Now consider this less-amusing outburst from a couple of days ago, responding to District Judge James Robart putting the brakes on the Muslim ban: 

Which was preceded by:

And don’t forget the “so-called judge” zinger.

It seems obvious to me that he is simply lashing out like the petulant child that he is — shifting blame as usual, as quickly and small-handedly as possible.

And yet.

It seems equally obvious that, whether there is intentional method to his madness or not, that in addition to the reprehensible attempt to cow an — the — independent branch of government, these tweets serve to lay down a very chilling marker.

What he’s doing is pre-washing his hands of any accountability or blame if and when a terrorist attack occurs on US soil. And we all know what we mean by “terrorist,” right? After all, there’s only one kind.

Which means, using the only metric that matters to him, he’ll have “won.” (Which also explains another alarming belief inside the White House walls: Criticism is treason.) And he’ll then have every reason and right, using the logic of a bad high school student, to finally slough off the petty shackles of rules and laws that constantly get in his way, and use his common sense to institute the kind of swaggering, reality-show-ready-fire-aim, punitive retaliatory measures that will make his original Muslim ban seem like gentlest and most reasonable tap on the wrist. Who’s going to stop him?

Ok, worst-case scenario. Deep breaths.

Knowing that he’s going to use any excuse to extend and expand his White Nationalist rule — whether in fits and starts, or in barely discernable steps, or in one fell swoop — it pays to be prepared. We have to get out in front of the train before it picks up too much steam.

So what’s my One True Idea Which Is The Only Logical Thing To Do And All Right-Thinking People Should Agree?

First, as I said, be prepared. The spontaneous protests immediately following the Muslim ban order were very effective. A terror-related shock to the system will require an even larger display of true patriotism.

Beyond that, we need a story. (Yes, another one.) A simple message, repeated over and over and over again. Not about a specific policy or action, but about him. Something that would, if embedded in popular culture, turn a lot of what he’s trying to spin into straw. Something along the lines of: He’s a crybaby who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions.

No brilliant insight there. Saturday Night Live, for one, has been all over this. The goal is (as many private citizens, foreign leaders and actual terrorists have discovered) to push his buttons. To make any response reinforce the main story. To make him a laughingstock and take away his power to instill fear. And it’s just one part of a concerted, comprehensive, messy, not-fully-in-lockstep-and-that’s-ok resistance. It really does take all kinds. 

Note for the record that I’m under no delusion that it’s possible to tell this story to his rotten core. And while there may be a few small cracks showing, Congressional Republicans are nowhere close to deserting their ill-tempered leader. But as we saw from the Women’s March and ongoing protests, there are a lot of us ready to fight the good fight. And as we saw with the Muslim ban, and with Betty DeVos, pressure from the people can actually harden the spines of Democratic Party leaders — and help sway public opinion.

Foolproof? Of course not. During the campaign, making it all about him didn’t work. But I think at the time, a lot of people believed it really could never happen here. Now that it has, and now that the stakes are so high, more people are paying attention, and not liking what they see.

In fact, what we need to do is turn him back into the joke that he once was.

We know that words matter, and stories matter. We know that people are afraid, and events are likely to ratchet that up. So before worst comes to worst, let’s all get out there and point and laugh.

Before the fall.

I know I’m not alone in having a hard time adjusting to our new surreality. This can’t really be happening, can it?

Every night getting ready for bed, I find myself having to fight thoughts about the coming regime change — to keep them from playing in an endless loop and making sanity, not to mention sleep, impossible. (Pushing them aside with analyses of the plots of whatever mind-numbing TV I’ve intentionally subjected myself to seems to do the trick. I have some very insightful thoughts on the narrative inconsistencies in Timeless, if you’re interested.)

During the hours I’m supposed to be awake, I struggle with the whole “what the hell do we do now” issue. Here’s your opportunity to share my struggle.

What’s the emperor wearing today?

Maybe we’re living in a fractured fairy tale: The Trumperor’s New Clothes. Much as I like the analogy, it’s not quite right. First off, his clothes are made of gold-plated bile and invective, plain as day for all to see.

And clearly not everyone is going along with his charade; lots of people are saying that his thin skin is showing. But the people who loved him before and love him now do so because he’s not wearing ordinary clothes. He’s his own man! And if it pisses off liberal elites and upsets their norms, all the better. And right now, those are the only people that matter.

How are the villagers responding?

The news media? Well, collectively they would prefer not to look stupid, and many outlets would be happy to curry favor and avoid unpleasantness. But the main problem is even bigger: they don’t know how to play this new emperor’s game. Like most of the rest of us, they’ve never seen one like this before.

Carefully calculated or the result of idiot savant syndrome, Trump is playing a different game: Calvinball on Constitution Avenue. There’s a lot of work to be done by the responsible press (surprise: it’s not the only kind!) to study up on similar manipulative charlatans and learn the new rules — or at least unlearn some old ones. The alternative is, in true Calvinball fashion, playing Charlie Brown to Lucy and her football for the next four years.

Another problem isn’t really new: our news media (and our political institutions and our society in general) have always been more comfortable with, and more structurally set up for, “just the fact, ma’am” style story framing. Hence the overreliance on “he said, she said” coverage.

And when I say not new, I really mean: here’s my chance to dig up one of my favorite old Doonesbury strips!

(For you yungins, the impeachment being contemplated was that of Richard M. Nixon.)

(For you yungins, the impeachment being contemplated was that of Richard M. Nixon.)

We’re seeing it play out right now in the nomination of Mick Mulvaney to be White House budget director. Who? Right. There are so many other egregious nominees that he’s kind of a deplorable backbencher. But he became mainstream-news-worthy because “he had failed to pay more than $15,000 in taxes for a household employee in the early 2000s.” Not because of concerns about Trump’s spending priorities. Not because of completely implausible budget projections. Not because the numbers just don’t add up.

Because of an easily quantifiable, all-too-common misdemeanor. 

Don’t get me wrong — I’ll take it if it helps to throw some sand in the gears. (And I can hear the invocations of Al Capone and tax evasion, thank you very much.) The point is that a reprehensible but low-level unlawful matter, whether it’s a distraction or not, is easy to get your hands around. Budget analysis and parsing out the real-world implications of policy proposals is complicated and time-consuming and requires journalistic judgment. And many outposts of the press have no time or stomach for that anymore.

But wait, it gets worse.

How about them Burghers?

I’m seeing a more troubling trend along the parade route: the willingness of business leaders to be puppets in the ongoing Punch & Jobby show playing out on Twitter.

It’s infuriating to see Trump taking credit for heroically saving or magically creating jobs when those claims are, what’s the word? Straight-up lies? (And I haven’t seen any tweets about Lowe’s yet.) But the sad! truth is that there’s no business interest in opposing him at the moment. Let me turn the mic over to Paul Krugman:

Bear in mind that corporations have every incentive to go along with the spin. Suppose that you’re a C.E.O. who wants to curry favor with the new administration. One thing you can do, of course, is steer business to Trump hotels and other businesses. But another thing you can do is help generate Trump-friendly headlines.

Keeping a few hundred jobs in America for a couple of years is a pretty cheap form of campaign contribution; pretending that the administration persuaded you to add some jobs you actually would have added anyway is even cheaper.

Right. Of course (to bring my two streams of thought together),

... none of this would work without the complicity of the news media. And I’m not talking about “fake news,” as big a problem as that is becoming; I’m talking about respectable, mainstream news coverage.

Slate has started a series that will explore the veracity of Trumps job claims: Deal or Faux Deal? But it’s going to be a steep hill to climb to cut through the bullshit and puffery. And what may initially be PR wins will soon have — are already having — significant policy implications.

So there’s no fairy-tale ending?

Well, at this point I think the moral is: just give up. Wait, strike that. Here are a couple of rays of sunshine:

Trump is remarkably unpopular. Not just his-ratings-are-lower-than-other-incoming-presidents unpopular (though they are, by a lot); but actually, truly well underwater in the favorability department — the only president-elect with that dubious distinction going back to 1953, according to Gallop. (I don’t know if their records go back any further.) Even his numbers among Republicans, while high, are not in the normal North Korean-like 90%+ range.

Which means that he’s doing a great job wearing out his welcome before he’s even walked through the White House door. “[T]he unprecedented concern about Trump in polling since the election also signals he may be miscalculating how much turmoil most Americans will tolerate from a president.”

Now for some tough love: no fairy-tale ending? Boo-fucking-hoo.

For starters: If you’re still, like me, at least occasionally falling into oh shit oh shit oh shit mode, get over it:

I think there’s still a bit of a “somebody do something” mentality, in which the hand-wringers are somewhat passively hoping someone else will solve this problem.

Thing is: There is no someone else. No one is coming to save us from Trump and his merry band of egregious nincompoops. If there is saving to be done, it comes from us, or not at all. Be the “someone else” you want to see in this world. Because otherwise you’re leaving it to the horde of racists and bigots following in Trump’s wake. And that’s not acceptable.

At the very least, if you can’t get out of oh shit oh shit oh shit mode, then make goddamn sure you’re not making things harder for the people who are stepping up. I think it’s time to realize that we’re in a “perfect is the enemy of good” situation.

And this is mostly directed at the press, but good advice for all: Don’t be a crybaby:

I've been surprised at the extent to which right-thinking people are all but threatening themselves with what Trump might do to, collapsing into their own sense of powerlessness. Maybe he'll jail his opponents! Maybe he'll call off the 2018 election! Here it is worth remembering things we learned from the campaign. Trump's one true gift is his ability to get his critics to surrender up their own dignity somehow of their own free will.... Trump is a punk and a bully. People who don't surrender up their dignity to him unhinge him.

What about happily ever after?

Slow down, we’ve got a long way to go. And a lot of hard work to do.

First: Don’t be normal. I’ve mentioned before the need to (and the struggle to) avoid normalizing Trumpian behavior. With so much of it flying around, it’s easy to lose track, and easy to lose sight of just how out of bounds so much of it is. Here’s one handy cheat sheet. Start one of your own!

Second: Control the conversation. We choose whether Trump is legitimate. At this point it’s not about counting electoral votes, it’s about whether Trump’s agenda, such as it is, will be enacted. In a literal sense, no, we can’t stop the House and Senate from following Trump off a cliff. But we do have the ability to make Republicans feel the heat. To make big business uncomfortable cozying up to the administration. To choose the issues to rally around.

It can’t be done? It’s being done.

People across the country are organizing and making themselves heard on healthcare, and the strategy to support and further those efforts is being debated and honed. This is making Republican congresspeople run scared and Republican governors tap the brakes.

And it’s gotten a major business lobbying organization joining the pushback against Obamacare repeal. Sure, it’s in the interest of the American Hospital Association to say that — which is exactly the point. We have it in our power to make it in the interest of big businesses to oppose the plans coming out of Congress and the White House.

It can’t be done? It’s being done.

In North Carolina, the pushback against HB2 has led to conventions being cancelled, corporate expansions being withdrawn, major sporting events being pulled, and widespread condemnation from business lobbying groups and individual businesses of all sizes (including IBM). All because they didn’t want to be associated with anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Maybe it was prompted by moral concerns, or more basic issues of equity and civil rights. Or maybe it was a pure bottom-line decision: loss of income, deteriorating image, alienated customers. Whatever the reason, opposition to HB2 worked by making it untenable for the business community to sit on the sidelines.

It’s not a magic bullet; we got rid of the governor who signed the bill, but HB2 is still on the books. Because, yeah, there are people and organizations pushing back against us from the other side.

We’re not going to win them all. Not even if all of us go all out all the time for the next four years. And none of us can do that. We each can’t do everything. But we can tag team this thing, protesting and fighting when we have the strength and will, knowing that there will be someone else to pick up the slack when it’s time to refresh and regroup.

Knowing that there are going to be a hundred different ways to get engaged, dozens of policies and problems to focus on, countless opportunities to get creative.

Knowing that we’re not all going to agree on issues or tactics or strategies and that’s okay. On our way to the next election, we’ve got hearts and minds to change, and it’s going to take a lot of different methods to change them.

Trump is many things. But the most important to remember is this: he is weak. He is a coward who doesn’t like to be challenged. So let’s challenge him. And he’s a politician whose support is already sinking. So let’s throw him an anchor.

We can’t yet win in Congress, but we can win in the court of public opinion, as long as we don’t let ourselves get distracted, or try to play by his rules. We can make life difficult for those who are trying to destroy our government from the inside. We can make it harder on businesses to stay silent as the Trumperor passes by. We can become the people who matter.

Once upon a time, part four.

So, what can we learn from this disaster movie? (The one I laid out for you in excruciating detail in parts one, two and three.) I’ve gone ahead and overreached a bit to tease out a few important lessons, and one hard truth. (Click-baity!)

1. Tell us a story. The lesson to learn from What Just Happened is not that we shouldn’t shape political and social-issue message into persuasive narratives. Ironically, being members of the reality-based community makes it really, really hard for people on the left to internalize a blindingly obvious reality: As we’ve seen time and time again, facts don’t win elections. We can talk all we want about people voting against their own interests and keep yelling “don’t they get it?!?” at the tv, but it won’t matter. Consumers and voters (same thing, right?) don’t rely on logic to make decisions; we pick and choose facts to confirm choices based in emotion and feeling. We like to think that our worldview is constructed out of things we know to be true, but more often than not the process works in reverse.

And this is not always a bad thing. Sure, we’ve erred way too far in the direction of treating people’s votes as a personal statement rather than a utilitarian exchange (my casting a vote is really not about my feelings), But as much as I didn’t want to have a beer with W., Obama did give me hope, and he painted a very compelling picture of what this country could be. That’s important. Voting may be a functional act, but it’s a means to a more fulfilling end.

Just as important, the things that really divide us in this country are not based in factual disagreements. There are different philosophies about government, different hierarchies of moral values, different belief and nonbelief systems, differing ways to assess the worth of people and places. Again, it’s not as if exposing people to “the facts” would erase these differences; people choose to believe or disbelieve facts based on these differences.

So we need to present people with a compelling story, one that makes sense with their understanding of the world. This doesn’t mean a lowest-common-denominator story designed to offend no one and appeal to everyone. It doesn’t mean sweeping racism/misogyny/etc. under the rug. It means first thinking long and hard about who we really can and want to reach — it’s difficult to tell a good story if you don’t know who you’re talking to — and then finding the intersection between what we believe and what they’re interested in. And then articulating a story that begins in that intersection. And then hitting repeat.

And voilà! We have an effective, compelling storyline. One that’s both based in a simple truth that voters can understand, and reflects directly and positively the values of (whoever gets to make decisions for) the Democratic party.

Oh if only it were really that easy. The real world is much messier. In the absence of a national election to rally around, there will be multiple stories, good and worthy stories, competing for attention. These stories need to be told, and many of them can’t or shouldn’t come from a candidate or party. “Oh, they’re normal people just like us” paved the way for marriage equality. “It’s not fair that my family can’t survive on the minimum wage” is fueling the Fight for $15.

We all have stories to tell. Can they all be grouped under an umbrella super-story that makes it clear what “the left” stands for? Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: They have to be, if we have any hope of counteracting the story that the right has been telling about us for the past 50 years. Which leads to:

2. Keep talking. Stories take a long time to percolate. The best ones, in an electoral sense, articulate and get out in front of already emerging shifts in the political and social landscape. Sometimes this can be credited to fortuitous timing, or a particularly astute campaign manager. But often these seemingly inexorable transformations are the result of years, decades, of careful, deliberate, painstaking work to leverage public opinion and political capital. Republicans and their allies on the right are masters of this. They know how to play the long game.

Follow the lineage back to the Goldwater era and you can see exactly how we got where we are, thanks to billions of dollars spent convincing white middle America (and others) that government is both completely ineffective and incredibly successful at destroying sacred American values; that some “other,” usually of color, is both inherently inferior and amazingly capable of getting, taking or stealing benefits that are rightfully theirs; that coastal elites are effete liberal socialists cowering in the face of crime, guns and “Real America,” and yet still able to exert full control over banks, the media and entertainment. It takes a long time to lay out a story like that, and have it stick.

As part of this concerted, consistent effort, Republicans have learned to use the levers of power and politics amazingly well. See: neutering a governor in a shameless fit of sore-loserhood. Fortunately, they also know how to overplay their hand at times. See: trying to privatize Social Security. (They also have a weird penchant for over-the-top names for things.)

As hard and boring as this work is, Democrats and allies on the left have to do the same, on both the storytelling and machinery sides. The endgame played out with dramatic speed, but marriage equality did not happen overnight. The battles over abortion rights and gun control have gone on for decades, and unfortunately will continue. The infrastructure is growing, but it’s nowhere near an equal counterbalance yet, particularly when it comes to media mouthpieces. (We’ll save the discussion of the left/right split on fake news for another time.)

3. Duck. As we’ve been reminded in the past couple of weeks, it’s difficult to remain appropriately outraged when you can’t even recall all of the things you’re supposed to be outraged about. I described it as whack-a-mole, but it’s really more akin to dodge ball — a punishing, one-sided version where those red rubber balls never stop coming toward your head, because Trump has the automatic ball machine perfectly tuned to his specifications and running like a dream.

So while it’s been nice to see at least a few Congressional Democrats respond early and often, we’ve seen how this tactical approach plays out in the longer term. Being an opposition party gives Democrats the ability — the obligation — to oppose, but there has to be discipline and consistency.

Whether he knows what he’s doing or not, Trump can continue to use his Twitter feed to make progressives (in and out of office) dance to whatever tune he chooses. Unless progressives learn to resist his siren song.

Responding to every outrageous Trumpian act with heartfelt but haphazard outrage is back to whacking moles. With so many to hit, how do you create a compelling story of resistance? (We saw how well that worked for Hillary.) It will take a hell of a lot of willpower, and quick thinking, and strategic brilliance, to step off that particular treadmill. Stay disciplined. Be proactive. Channel the outrage. Control the story.

The good news is, some of the people on Capital Hill are at least aware of the issue.

4. Suspend disbelief. The bad news is, I think we’re just becoming aware of the epic scale of the story we’re now living in.

Which brings us to the bear shitting in the room.

Russian hacking and interference in the presidential election is maybe the biggest, most portentous story of the moment. But honestly I don’t know how to think about it. The peek behind that particular curtain gives me vertigo. Because it really sounds like a made-up story — a dystopian sci-fi vision of the near future. Or a not-quite Manchurian Candidate; more of a Tempertantrurian Candidate, one who blinds us to the truth not by presenting as his own opposite but by filling the sky with so much chaff we can’t see what is true or real anymore.

I’m not sure how to counter that, or even respond to it. Partly it’s my natural rational instinct to disbelieve conspiracy theories. (Damn you, reality-based community!) Partly it’s the implications that follow: How does one superpower respond to a former superpower meddling in the basic foundations of its governing structure? Escalation could happen very quickly if the people making decisions can’t be trusted to keep their heads....

In this particular case, Trump’s instinct to lash out, smear the messenger and deny, deny, deny may not serve him well — while, with any luck, avoiding doing irreparable global damage (if he can manage to keep his wrath aimed at domestic critics).

I don’t think he will be able to brush this under the orange rug and move on. That doesn’t mean he won’t try, by distracting us with some other Twitter-based inanity. (Maybe by picking a fight with...China?) And it doesn’t mean the GOP won’t quickly fall in line and try to banish this episode down the memory hole. (Thanks, Paul!)

Or maybe I still don’t get it. Maybe he’ll be wildly successful — at least as far as his audience of true believers (the only one he cares about) is concerned. Maybe he’s not spinning and spitting lies because he doesn’t know or care about the truth; he’s doing it to reinforce his story.

I’m willing to bet that Trump knows his Electoral College margin was tiny. I’m willing to bet that he knows that there weren’t three million illegitimate voters. I’m willing to bet that he knows Russia was trying to help him. He’s not concerned with facts or evidence; he’s focused on framing the story for his followers. Fact-checking, shmact-checking—that’s something the MSM does and elites care about. Trump is tweeting bald-faced lies to give his followers cover, to give them something they can believe that won’t reduce their faith in him.

And that kind of thing doesn’t stop with an election; it’s now being baked into the operation of government itself. The story of a campaign is becoming the story of our country. And the fact that it pisses off libtards makes it that much sweeter (or for a lot of his base, is actually the point).

Something must be done. Right? We can’t let election-shaking shenanigans imported from overseas be allowed to stand. Right? Have we, finally, really lost all sense of decency?

I don’t believe it’s too late to duck. But many of us have been numbed by the onslaught of norm-smashing and “nothing-like-this-in-our”-histrionics and are a little too dazed at the moment to clearly think things through.  

That leaves me at the hard truth which is really the real starting place, and ultimately the most important lesson.

5. Pay attention. Remember. Never normalize.

It’s not much. But it’s everything. 

Once upon a time, part three.

To pick up where I left off: There were fatal flaws with Hillary’s approach to telling her own story during the general election campaign — some strategic, some tactical and one insurmountable.

The first flaw was not having a single, powerful, simple story and sticking with it. (Something for which Obama was famous.) This was compounded by the fuzziness and inherent blah-ness that made it impossible for the Plugger story to resonate.

A second, strategic flaw was writing a closing story that didn’t have Hillary Clinton at its center, let alone as its hero. (She was, in fact, not really the hero of any of her own stories. In one, she was the dutiful worker bee. In another, she explicitly made her various constituencies, personified in her videos, the center of attention. And in the backstory, she stood in for all women.) In the end, she was a bulwark. This last chapter was a defensive, finger-in-the-dike tale. A reaction to circumstances rather than the proactive, affirming vision represented by Stronger Together.

And damn, it really should have worked. I mean, building walls? Registering Muslims? Grabbing pussies? Not to mention the heights of political incompetence and depths of policy knowledge. This was a one-of-a-kind opponent who, by all that is right and good, should have self-immolated months before. Reminding people of that fact should have been enough.

A big reason it wasn’t enough was a major tactical flaw, related to the first flaw mentioned above: the campaign allowed itself to be thrown off its game. Intentionally set or not, they fell into the trap of reacting to events, instead of controlling them. They didn’t see this — or they did, and just didn’t know how to deal with the one-of-a-kindness of our first reality TV candidate. The normal rules simply did not apply. Yes, presidential campaigns aren’t waged or won with facts, and stories are essential. But typically these stories — based on nostalgia or fear or lies or whatever — require some internal coherence to hold up. In 2016, that went out the window.

This was compounded by an overarching flaw: hubris. Understandable, because really, who the hell thought that Mr. Cheetos ever had a shot? Not me. I never imagined that so many millions of people would so eagerly embrace or so willingly look past his ... (fill in the blank; you’ve read this list from me before). This led to electoral overreach (maybe we’ve got a shot in Utah!) and a much-too-late pivot toward directly addressing a serious threat — which, as noted above, they never did quite figure out.

What they missed was that Trump inverted Hillary’s it’s-not-really-about-me approach. His story was literally all about him.

His character was his campaign. He was able to say anything, no matter how much or how quickly it contradicted something else he had said, and it didn’t matter. He was able to spit on accepted political “norms” (more on that another time maybe) and more specifically upend Republican dogma without consequence. As a reality entertainment star, he was playing a part. His words were simply set dressing. In this world, once a persona has been established (villain, two-timer, backstabber, straight talker, etc.), all the audience requires is a steady repetition of favorite catchphrases and applause lines ("lock her up!"), and an ongoing and ideally escalating series of thrills and cliffhangers.

Not only did this keep his core supporters satisfied throughout a long campaign, but it left the Clinton campaign (thanks to its closing story) — and the press, which also had no idea what to do with a problem like Trump — chasing and responding to an ever-expanding set of outrageous statements, lies, contradictions and logical impossibilities. Baiting and switching. Bobbing and weaving. (How much of this was intentional on his part, how much was the calculation of his team and how much was sheer Id-driven happenstance is still up for debate.)

Instead of adding up to an unimpeachable argument against him, it buzzed like a swarm of gnats — impossible to hold onto and more annoying than anything else. If you weren’t predisposed to recoil from his very orange hair, or had no deep interest in politics or policy, it all and all-too-quickly became background noise.

Oh, and that press I mentioned? Say hello to the insurmountable flaw. The egregiousness of the national journalistic corps knows few bounds. (Pardon my tarring of the entire media world with a single brush, but this was an amazingly widespread weakness.)

On the one hand, they were clearly outmaneuvered by a superior savant of an opponent. I’m not sure it’s fair to blame them for having a hard time figuring out how to deal with a lifelong conman and mercurial egomaniac like Donald J. Trump. But I do, believe me I do. That’s their friggin’ job. One at which they continue to struggle, and fail.

And on the other hand? If anything, that was worse. Where they really shredded just about any possibility of Hillary’s stories gaining traction was in their dogged determination to act as Javert, turning every action, email and decision into a presumed scandal and refusing to accept “there’s nothing here” for an answer — and making damn sure that their readers and viewers would have great difficulty ever reaching that conclusion. She certainly has her flaws, and could rightfully be dinged for unforced errors before and during the campaign, but we were in a “Hillary Clinton: Ogre Or Troll? Opinions Differ.” echo chamber.

I sound like a Hillary apologist. Fair enough. A good candidate — a better candidate? — may have found a way to overcome this, to get around the press. A singular candidate certainly did. But try this thought experiment: If Hillary had been running against Cruz, or Rubio, or Bush, do you think the “first woman president” story would still have been pushed all the way to the furthest back burner of election coverage? Or compare 2008 coverage specifically focused on The First Black President story to treatment of 2016’s First Female President. Even when the Obama story hit a speed bump, it was more often that not because of race (see: Jeremiah Wright, Kenya, Michelle’s’ nonexistent Whitey tape, etc.)

Also too: We can and should argue about the role played in the election by James Comey and other nefarious outside actors (gerrymanderers, vote suppressers, hackers, etc.). Votes were swung, no doubt.

But we rely on the press to sift through the haystacks and find the actual needles. This time, they acted as if the entire pile was HIV-infected hypodermics. There really were Clinton Rules.

Maybe it was familiarity breeding contempt. Maybe it was a perversion of the already perverse equal time, “both sides do it” instinct. Maybe it was an uncontrollable Pavlovian response conditioned by the modern-day requirement for ready/fire/aim breaking news. Maybe it was, fatefully and painfully enough, because the media assumed along with the rest of us that Trump was toast and decided to focus their energies elsewhere. (The conventional wisdom had to come from somewhere, after all.) Whatever the reasons, she was always walking ten miles through the snow to get to and from work, uphill both ways.

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So no, I don’t think it was absence of story that doomed the Clinton presidency. There was plenty of story — too much story — to go around.

It just wasn’t strong enough and sharp enough to stop a uniquely devious and despicable black swan candidate, abetted by an exceptionally ineffectual press corps, from besting a traditionally run, overconfident, moderately well-executed campaign. (I say moderately, but in retrospect whatever happened to the much-vaunted, micro-targeted Clinton GOTV effort that was going to be worth at least a percentage point or two? Never mind.)

Like many aspects of the election, a comparison of the two sides’ stories kind of misses the point, trying to force equivalence where there can be none. (See? Journalism is hard.)

Which leads (finally!) to what you’ll get in part four: Does any of this teach us anything? Because believe it or not, this series is not intended to be a completely useless intellectual exercise.