Donald Trump speaks to a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 17th, the same day a bomb went off in New York City. Photograph by Mike Segar/Reuters

It's been a whirlwind ninety-six hours, Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noted during Sunday's program. But, he added, "that's pretty much the description you can do for any ninety-six hours during this campaign." It was hard to argue with him. One of the difficulties of analyzing this election has been in disentangling the daily news, which has seldom failed to shock, from the larger forces driving the contest.

One underlying factor that never goes away is the character of Donald Trump. If it hadn't been for the explosion on West 23rd Street, in Manhattan, on Saturday night, the Sunday talk shows would have been dominated by the prepared remarks on birtherism that Trump delivered on Friday, and by what appeared to be some off-the-cuff remarks he made later that day, when he suggested that Hillary Clinton's Secret Service bodyguards should be disarmed.

After the explosion, which injured twenty-nine people, but, mercifully, didn't kill anybody, some of the attention inevitably shifted—not just to what had happened in New York City but also to a pipe-bomb explosion in New Jersey, near the route of a Marine Corps charity run, and to a knife attack on shoppers at a mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, by an assailant whom an off-duty police officer shot dead. (All three incidents happened within a few hours of each other on Saturday.)

The political shows, to their credit, didn't drop the Trump stories. Some commentators have cited Trump’s actions on Friday as evidence of the "old Trump" reëmerging. That's inaccurate. As Alex Castellanos, one of the Republican candidate's own surrogates, freely admitted during a “Meet the Press” panel discussion, there was never a “new” Trump. There is just Trump—a noisy but hollow shell, who is willing to say virtually anything, at any time, with blatant disregard for truth or decency, but who also had enough wit about him a month ago to read the polls and realize that, after his disgraceful and counter-productive attack on the Khan family, he needed to tone things down a bit. On Friday, with some of the polls turning in his favor, he apparently felt confident enough to allow himself some more leeway.

As is often the case with Trump, it was difficult to know which of his comments was most offensive. Was it his brief and apology-free disavowal of the calumny against President Obama that he had pressed for the past five years? Was it his charge that birtherism, which originated in the right-wing fringes of the Republican Party, was invented by Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign? Or was it the casual suggestion, for the second time in a couple of months, of the possibility that an angry gun owner might go out and shoot his opponent?

With Trump unavailable, Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, and Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, took on the task of trying to defend the indefensible on television. On “Meet the Press,” under persistent questioning from Todd, who didn't try to hide his outrage, Conway refused to say exactly when Trump had finally concluded that President Obama was born in the United States. "You'll have to ask him that," she said. "That's a personal decision." When Todd asked Conway if Trump owed the President an apology, she dodged the question. And she did the same thing when Todd asked if Trump would send five million dollars to charity to meet a pledge he made in 2012, when he said he'd pay that amount for proof that Obama had been born in this country.

Over on “Fox News Sunday,” Governor Christie, true to form, went on the offensive when Chris Wallace asked him about Trump's incendiary comments about Clinton's security detail. He attacked Tim Kaine, Clinton's running mate, who, earlier in the show, had accurately described Trump's comment as "an incitement to violence or an encouragement of violence, or at least being cavalier and reckless about violence." Ignoring the second half of Kaine's comment, Christie said it was "outrageous" to say that Trump had been inciting violence, and added that Kaine "owes Hillary Clinton an apology."

In New York, at least, Christie's comments were cut short when the local Fox station switched to the scene in Manhattan, where Governor Andrew Cuomo was talking to reporters after touring the bomb site on West 23rd Street and the surrounding area. "A bomb exploding in New York is obviously an act of terrorism," Cuomo said. "But it's not linked to international terrorism. In other words, we find no links to ISIS, etc." Cuomo also said that whoever planted the bomb, and the similar one that police found on West 27th Street, would be brought to justice. He added that, while the city and state would take extra security precautions in the next few days, such as deploying more cops and members of the National Guard, life in New York would go on as normal. "We are not going to let them instill fear," Cuomo said. "Because then they win."

These were admirable sentiments. But it remains to be seen how the incident in New York, and those in New Jersey and Minnesota, will affect the tenor of the Presidential contest. Among Republicans, there is a belief that Trump benefits from anything that appears to confirm his dystopian portrayal of a nation and globe slipping out of control. As Castellanos put it, "Trump is strength in an uncertain world."

Trump, of course, trumpets this self-serving and bogus message at every opportunity. Speaking in Colorado Springs on Saturday night, he said, "I must tell you that just before I got off the plane a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows what's going on. But boy we are living in a time—we better get very tough, folks. We better get very, very tough."

When Trump spoke these words, there hadn’t yet been confirmation that a bomb was the cause of the explosion. Clinton, when she addressed the incident, a little later on Saturday, was more cautious in her initial reaction. "I think it's always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions, because we are just in the beginning stages of trying to determine what happened," she said, after attending a dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The challenge now for the Clinton campaign is to break through Trump's bombast, to illuminate his ignorance of national-security issues, including terrorism, and to contrast his shallowness with the knowledge and experience of its own candidate. Above all, it needs to counter Trump's claims that the Democrats aren't doing enough, and won't do enough, to safeguard the country. During his appearance on “Meet the Press,” Kaine began by reminding viewers that his running mate had been the U.S. Senator for New York on 9/11 and was "part of the national-security team that worked together to revive the hunt and wipe out bin Laden." Then Kaine pointed to the importance of intelligence-sharing in preventing terrorist attacks, and, taking a jab at Trump, added, "you don't get the intelligence-sharing unless the alliances, like the NATO Alliance, are strong."

Todd pressed Kaine on whether people living in the United States, like the inhabitants of Europe, would have to get used to occasional acts of terrorism, either domestically or internationally motivated. Wasn't this, he asked, "a new normal that Americans just have to deal with?" Kaine insisted it wasn't. "I don't accept that it's a new normal," he said. "You know, we don't know yet about the cause of these incidents. But we're not allowing it to be a normal. We're trying to destroy ISIS right now."

It wasn't the subject Kaine had come to talk about, but, when bombs go off, the conversation inevitably changes. That said, nobody should forget the stories that were displaced from the headlines, or what they conveyed about America's would-be strong man.