Boooo. The air is warm, the humidity so thick it feels soft, like a damp fleece blanket. Far from here, out in reality, the whole flimsy Trump edifice is crashing down. His predatory boasts have come to light; the women he has preyed upon, realizing they are not alone, are coming out of the woodwork. The other Republicans on the ballot, trapped like doomed deer in oncoming headlights, are frozen between fleeing in terror or continuing to insist that Clinton is even worse, that bad people can do good things, that Trump remains a gamble worth taking.

The Republicans appeased Trump, thinking that placating him would stave off chaos. But the chaos came anyway, and now it has taken over.

"I always figure things out, folks," Trump says. "There's a whole sinister deal going on."

As the campaign enters its gruesome, death-rattle phase—yes, there are three and a half more weeks of this to endure—Trump is refusing to go down without a fight. He intends to drag them all with him if he can, down into the swirling chaos. Scary clowns have been popping up all over the country, and somehow this does not seem like a coincidence.

This, this massive crowd in a giant barn in the middle of Florida, amid a landscape dotted with auto-body shops and one-story houses and dripping with Spanish moss, is all Trump has left: his ravening hordes, the throngs that still flock to see him, impervious to the "reality" the crooked media portrays. The media, after all, is just an extension of the Clinton campaign, as Trump contends the emails conclusively reveal.

He has, too, his traveling circus, the shrinking crew of political castoffs still willing to sing his praises, starting with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who tells the crowd, "We're going to win! We're going to win Florida!" Giuliani says of the emails, "Don't they prove everything we ever thought about her was true? Now it's in writing, and all those conspiracy theories turn out to be correct!" Indeed, the emails have revealed a Clinton apparatus that is cozy with the media, unrepentantly globalist, and cravenly two-faced, just as her opponents contended.

Giuliani also says, of September 11, "I was there that day, and I don't remember seeing Hillary Clinton that day," even though she never claimed to have been there, and the two of them toured the site together shortly afterward. (He later apologized.) But you can say whatever you want to this crowd and they'll believe you, because they don't believe anyone who tells them otherwise.

And Trump has the Republican Party he has taken hostage and refused to relinquish. "I am a member of Congress and I support Donald Trump," Representative Daniel Webster tells the crowd defiantly. Another local congressman, Ted Yoho, says he's not condoning or making excuses for things Trump said "11 years ago in a locker room," as if it were actually a locker room—it was on a bus—but he insists Trump has apologized and Clinton is worse.