Was there much attention to that? Nah. It was expected, familiar, another artless evasion atop an ever-growing Matterhorn of lies. Political observers wondered more about how her bungle squared with her presidential ambitions than about how his bogusness squared with the presidency itself. They fretted over her flaws because they — and more crucially, many American voters — long ago resigned themselves to his. Hers are quantifiable, definable. His have no bounds.

That’s Trump’s edge over everybody. That’s his gift. He can do no wrong because he’s all wrong. He never really shocks because he’s a perpetual shock.

When someone frolics at the nadir for as long as he has, there’s nowhere to go but sideways.

He reminds me of a long-held fantasy of mine: that someday, to head the media off at the pass, a candidate would begin his or her campaign by holding a news conference and telling reporters: “Let me save you a lot of time and me a lot of grief. I hereby introduce all the skeletons in my closet: this drug, that dalliance, some naked greed here, several suspicious tax maneuvers there and, oh, I once adopted a dog from the pound and returned it the next day. Decide if I’m disqualified. Then we can move on to a conversation about how to slow the warming of the globe.”

Except for the global-warming part, Trump essentially did that — not when he glided down that escalator in Trump Tower but by living the life that he had lived, under the glare that he had invited, until then. He hadn’t concealed his sexual infidelity; he’d crowed about it. He couldn’t pantomime Puritanism; he’d emblazoned his name on casinos and the Miss Universe pageant.

It was clear that he had amassed his fortune through convenient bankruptcies, unsavory alliances and stiffed creditors.