“It’s like there’s a horse loose in a hospital!” That’s American standup comic John Mulaney’s description of the Trump presidency. “I think eventually everything’s going to be OK, but I have no idea what’s going to happen next. And neither do any of you, and neither do your parents. ‘Cause there’s a horse loose in the hospital!’”

Mulaney says this in Kid Gorgeous and I urge you to watch it on Netflix because he talks about childhood, about being a small person in a world run by grown-ups — later in life, you will realize how unwell these grown-ups were — and that’s what living in the arbitrariness of Trump world is like. “No one knows what the horse is going to do next. Least of all the horse.”

Sen. John McCain, on his deathbed in Arizona, has decided that he doesn’t want President Trump at his funeral. I mean, imagine the Donald at a funeral. He’d be eating the floral arrangements.

Then McCain finally said it. He wishes he had chosen Sen. Joe Lieberman as a running mate in 2008. He chose Sarah Palin because he was told that Lieberman was a bad choice — which he was — because he had caucused with the Democrats and favoured abortion rights. McCain seems to be blaming his advisers and cannot even bear to say Palin’s name out loud, so his confession is less than candid.

But everyone else is saying this, carefully, because McCain is a good person facing death with remarkable courage.

McCain opened the door. He let Palin into the hospital.

Palin was frightening from the start, her first speech at the Republican convention throwing lumps of red meat to what came to be known as the deplorables. She was unread, profoundly ignorant of policy and social mores, she attacked Barack Obama in the most contemptuous terms, she had a catastrophically badly-behaved family, and she could whip up a Republican crowd into the weird sexualized rants of “Drill, baby drill” that foreshadowed the current Republican backlash against women’s rights and sexual behaviour.

Take a string and follow it from Palin to Trump. Bring the ends of the string together.

At first, it was thrilling to see a woman’s name on the Republican ticket. Then the woman spoke. My assessment of Palin at the convention was predictive and accurate, though unpopular at the time, and I would have loved to see her find some way to civilize herself. (A decade later, she has yet to do this.)

It’s good for a journalist to be right, one amused editor told me later, but it’s not pleasant to be the first to do it. And a few weeks later, like an overturning boat that manages to right itself in the water, every normal person agreed with me that Palin was a Mama Grizzly embarrassment.

It didn’t matter. Obama/Biden was going to defeat McCain/Palin anyway. What mattered was the populist surge that Palin began.

In 2016, before Trump’s win, President Obama said it out loud. “I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emergence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea party, and the shift in the centre of gravity for the Republican Party.”

At that point, Obama wasn’t to know what would happen, that the call would be coming from inside the house, from an ignorant, racist sexual degenerate whose personal insecurities, sudden rages and links to Putin’s Russia would make America increasingly unrecognizable to its own citizens and the world.

We are now at the point in the news cycle where one dare not take a shower without missing the latest horror story, which was mining magnate Don Blankenship’s “China people,” followed by New York Attorney-General Eric Schneiderman allegedly being a sexual psychopath, since overtaken by news of the anti-nuclear deal with Iran, followed by _________ (fill in the space).

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The problem is less what the horse is doing to the hospital — wrecking the place — but more getting it out permanently. “Maybe the horse-catcher will catch the horse,” says Mulaney. “And then the horse is like ‘I’ve fired the horse-catcher.’” Mulaney is horrified. “The horse can do that?”

What then? An evangelical horse?