At the end of most elections, the political press corps tends to focus on what campaigns call their candidates’ “closing arguments.” The use of courtroom jargon is fitting, because the point of the “closing argument” is to offer the people who decide the election a last-best summation of the case.

For candidates, this usually entails putting on their best faces. Relentless positivity, substantive heft, resume burnishing, and so on.

Donald Trump’s closing argument is that he can use a teleprompter. Not necessarily that the words he reads off the teleprompter are true or intelligent, just that he can say all of them out loud and in order. In the final days of this campaign, we have returned to where we began, with an odd fixation on whether this man who aspires to the presidency can avoid saying anything ignorant, bigoted, inscrutable, or otherwise disqualifying for an hour or so at a time, once or twice a day.

“In what many around him took as a hopeful sign heading into the final stretch of the campaign, the Republican presidential nominee did not turn to Twitter to vent his frustration, as he would have in the past,” reports Yahoo News’ Holly Bailey, a campaign vet. “Though he still regularly breaks from his prepared remarks—often to attack the ‘dishonest media’ to the delight of his supporters—Trump has been more pointed in making his case about why he should win the White House.”

Less than a week before election day, his aides consider it a matter of cardinal importance that Trump recede from the public spotlight as much as possible—he is “trying so hard to keep control,” as CNN’s Dana Bash explained Wednesday night, “because when he becomes the story in the general election it tends to be bad for Donald Trump.”