But sometimes it’s worth returning to what we used to know about our politics, and recalling once again what normalcy looks like. The eve of the first presidential debate is a good time for that exercise, because there’s been so much gaming-out of how Trump might ambush Hillary Clinton, how he might manage expectations well enough to make a poor performance look like victory, that it’s easy to lose sight of the core truth: It will be ridiculous if Donald Trump wins these debates.

Nobody wants to say this outright because it once seemed ridiculous to imagine that Trump could win the primary debates as well. But those debates were not like the debates that we’re about to watch; indeed, they were not really debates at all. They were more like the early episodes of a reality-television program — a genre that Trump knows very well — in which a host of would-be apprentices or survivors jostles for camera time and tries to stand out from the pack.

Even late in the primary season Trump never shared the stage with fewer than three other rivals, and mostly he was on stage with many more. And during all that time he wasn’t really trying to debate those rivals; as James Fallows writes, he would go “into a kind of hibernation” whenever the conversation turned remotely substantive, and emerge to hurl insults and declaim his promises of greatness restored.

Meanwhile those rivals — as they themselves shamefacedly admitted later — weren’t really trying to compete with him, or at least not until the final few debates when the reality of what was happening finally forced their hands. (Save for John Kasich, who remained in a reality television show all his own till the end.)