His inexplicable battle with a Gold Star mother and an American hero’s grieving family also earned Trump a precipitous drop in his standing with voters. But after exceeding for a time the extremely low expectations that voters have placed on him, Trump raced into September leading comfortably in states won comfortably by Barack Obama such as Ohio and Iowa, while making other states such as Colorado and Pennsylvania uncomfortably close for Clinton’s Brooklyn team. Despite his proposed Muslim ban, his feigned ignorance of David Duke, his attack on the Khans and his stubborn refusal to take the most basic steps to prepare for the humbling task of being president of the United States of America, Trump entered his first debate with Hillary Clinton in his strongest position yet.

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Then came what some have called the worst week in the history of presidential politics. Trump gave a predictably rambling and incoherent performance in the second half of the first presidential debate last Monday. He spent the next several days fat-shaming a former beauty queen, started whining about a faulty microphone that none of the 80 million debate viewers noticed, and capped the week off by mocking Clinton’s health scare while using a throwaway line to accuse her of being an adulterer.

After that political week from hell, Trump has experienced a few drops in polls released in the past 24 hours. He’s once again down by double digits in Colorado. Florida has moved beyond the margin of error for Clinton for the first time in a while, and national polls also show a widening lead for the Democratic nominee. But despite a series of shameful episodes this week, Trump still leads in Ohio comfortably, he’s within the margin of error in North Carolina, and he’s staying within striking distance in Pennsylvania.

If I were a Clinton supporter or just an average citizen who doesn’t care to live out the plot line of a Cormac McCarthy novel, I would be very afraid. Given Trump’s behavior over the past week (and month and year), Trump should be down 20 points by now and the media should be speculating about Clinton’s cabinet choices. But that is not our fate. Instead, Americans seem to be buckling up for one more month of chaos, crude comments, leaked Democratic documents, the appeasement of Russian barbarism, ill-prepared debate performances and the worst presidential choice in U.S. history.

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