“These would be agreements between two parties that want to keep it quiet, and that’s up to them. They signed those agreements, and we’ll live with it.”

“So wait,” says Warren. “I just want to be clear.” She just wants to be clear!

“Some is how many?” She pauses so the silence can hang over the audience. Bloomberg closes his eyes for long periods, a thing you do when you want the room to know you’re enduring something you should not have to endure.

“And when you say they signed them,” Warren continues, “and they wanted them, if they wish now to speak out and tell their side of the story about what it is they allege, that’s now OK with you, you’re releasing them on television tonight?”

She looks at him, and he looks at us.

“Senator, no. The company and somebody else—the man and the woman, or it could be more than that—they decided they wanted to keep it quiet for everybody’s interest. They signed the agreements, and that’s what we’re going to live with.”

In American politics we do not go for the kill. We let people make arguments like “not allowing this woman to speak is in her interest,” politely retreat, and hope someone out there catches the lie.

“No,” Warren says, with perfect brutality. “The question is, Are the women bound by being muzzled by you.”

I felt this moment in the small of my back, and between my shoulder blades, and in one particular spot in my forearm that goes tingly when I’m nervous. A small child sucked milk from my chest and grew strong. Somewhere off in the distance, Chris Matthews rolled his eyes, unaware that the darkness was coming for him.

There’s a Joan Didion passage in Slouching Toward Bethlehem where some lightweight at a joke of a think tank instructs Joan, “Don’t make the mistake of taking a chair at the big table. … The talk there is pretty high powered.” Didion, the actual intellectual, absorbed this, allowed him his moment, and skewered him in an essay that would appear in one of the most enduring collections of all time. This is a mode of destruction with which women are accustomed, the devastating comment much afterward. Warren presented a dream of real-time vanquish. She took a man and forced him, before millions of people, into a binary choice he could not abide.

She did not have to be in battle. To watch Warren explain something was to watch someone with a particularly ordered mind, capable of seizing upon a narrow question, zooming out and carrying you concisely along a set of interlocking forces. Even when you didn’t agree, you could marvel at the fluidity with which she engaged the logic of the worldview. The system may be rigged, but she can untie the knot while you watch. It was so easy for her to see the steps of any sequential argument that she could abandon herself, really, to the mood. She could play. She could engage a dramatic pause, deliver a punchline and run jauntily offstage.