"And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done."

—Revelations 16:17

Well, there's nothing left but the shouting. Of course, there will be a lot of shouting, and who knows what is going to get itself shouted, so we all ought to be sticking around for it. But, at 7:12 on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump, Jr. threw 89 of New York's 95 delegates to his father, Donald J. Trump, making He, Trump the actual, no-kidding, really, honest to blog, Republican nominee for President of the United States of America. And one of the most ridiculous men in American political history became one of two citizens with a realistic chance to become the most powerful person in the world.

Bear in mind: The candidate is ridiculous, but his campaign isn't, and it never was.

Granted, it's afflicted with institutional ADHD and it occasionally needs a nap when it gets cranky. And granted that, from time to time, it appears to be under the command of several dozen drunken streetcar motormen, the campaign was dead serious when it wanted to be, and it wanted to be dead serious from the time it got here until that moment last night when Junior stepped up to the microphone.

It completely bent the Republican National Committee to its will. By the time the rebellious NeverTrump people were squashed in the Rules Committee, it was clear that this thing was wired like the Lunar Landing Module. It ran through the year impervious to the slanging from a great portion of the conservative intellectual apparatus. Who can forget the laff riot that was National Review's Very Special "Never Trump" Issue?

Bear in mind: The candidate is ridiculous, but his campaign isn't, and it never was.

It ran through the year impervious to episodes from the candidate himself that would have sunk the campaign of a longshot county supervisor bid. It ran through the year impervious to the other 17 candidates who found themselves caught up in a mystery play without a script. None of the other ones ever found their way to center stage and, ultimately, all fell, one by one, into the orchestra pit, and only one guy knew where the ladder was.

In Great Britain, mystery plays travelled from town to town in what were called "pageant wagons," and that was what the Trump campaign was. It was a pageant wagon, good only for entertainment purposes at the beginning, but gradually picking up steam until it became utterly unstoppable. Only then did people look down and see the spikes on the wheels and the iron ram on the front.

As the roll call of the states began last night, there was still some stirring among the dissatisfied souls in the hall. A weird rumor circulated that, rather than cast its vote, the Colorado delegation, home to Kendal Unruh, the leader of the anti-Trump forces, and a delegation that walked out in anger on Monday afternoon, instead would sit down and each one read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Alas, this bit of street theater never came about, probably because sending that many copies of Edward Gibbon's legendary doorstop would have required delivery up the Cuyahoga by barge. Nevertheless, Unruh was still plugging away as the media descended on the Colorado folks as the roll call began.

"This isn't about the nomination. Donald Trump is going to be the nominee," Unruh said. "This is about letting all the delegates vote their conscience. We did not come close to having a fair convention because of the RNC, and because of the Trump campaign to coerce some of the delegates." Colorado's name was called. Someone paid tribute to its mountains and to the Denver Broncos and then the state voted exactly the way the rules demanded—31 delegates for Ted Cruz and four for He, Trump, and that was pretty much it.

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(A few degrees east, there was a little stirring among the people from the District of Columbia. He, Trump hadn't come close to winning the district's primary, but the local party by-laws commanded that the delegates vote only for people whose names were put in nomination. Since only He, Trump qualified on Tuesday night, the vote was recorded as all 19 votes going into his column. Some people hollered to, "Poll the delegation," but they didn't sound really serious about it.)

The campaign was inevitable. The ground has been prepared for it for almost five decades. The ground was prepared when the Republican Party married itself to the flotsam of American apartheid. The ground was prepared when the Republican Party married itself to a politicized form of American Protestantism. The ground was prepared when the Republican Party allowed itself to get drunk on the fantasies and fabulisms of Ronald Reagan and discovered, mirabile dictu, that the country as a whole had a taste for the moonshine, too.

The ground was prepared when the Republican Party divorced itself from the proudest elements of its historical identity—the environmentalism of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the commitment to what once were quaintly called "internal improvements" of Dwight Eisenhower, and most critically, the party's dedication to some form of racial equality that was its founding purpose in the first place. The ground was prepared when Richard Nixon was elected, twice. Sooner or later, someone was going to find the proper vehicle to run amok on the ground that was so prepared. Sooner or later, as Mary Shelley warned the world, the monster always breaks the chains.

The campaign was inevitable. The ground has been prepared for it for almost five decades.

So it's his party, lock, stock, and Paul Ryan's balls. You could hear it when Mitch McConnell got booed as if he were a Clinton as soon as he poked his head out onto the stage on Tuesday night. You could see it when what was supposed to be Make America Work Again night turned into more Benghazi, more predators in the bushes, an accusation from the co-chair of the Republican Party that Bill Clinton was a sexual criminal, and more of the strange critters that rattle around the attic of Senator Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson.

The Republican Party, the Republicans in this hall, have finished a long march through 40 years of history, through Goldwater and Nixon and Reagan and two Bushes, through the NCPAC campaigns and the Moral Majority, through Gingrichism and the preposterous Clinton impeachment kabuki and the Florida heist and the Avignon Presidency, through birtherism, climate denial and intelligent design. It turns out that Donald Trump was who was there waiting for them at the end of it. He was inevitable, but it was a surprise all the same. I hope they're happy with him, because they brought the rest of us along for the ride.

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

—Revelation 18:1.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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