Sunday marks 100 days until the U.S. presidential election and the world is watching. It can’t look away. No one more so than political operatives, and Canada’s politics junkies are watching like hawks.

Part of that is professional. America sets the gold standard for political practitioners and the people who cover them. Part of it is cultural, to know as much about U.S. politics as Canada’s. The rest is sheer marvel.

Now that the dust has settled on the Republican and Democratic conventions, how are those Scotty Reston-quoting, David Halberstam-worshipping, electoral college-statistic memorizing junkies adjusting to what comedian and commentator John Oliver has dubbed, “The Holy Sh&*, Please Make it Stop Trash Fire Two Thousand F***teen,” also known as the 2016 presidential election?

They compared it to absurdist political comedies like Bullworth and Network.

“You don’t know what crazy is anymore,” said Scott Reid, a Liberal of the Paul Martin PMO vintage.

Reid, like everyone else watching American politics, is fixated almost entirely on Republican nominee Donald Trump, the campaign aberration who has shaken the core of what constitutes politics as usual.

“The professional political level doesn’t really know what to make of this. They’re anxious to analyze this, but you can’t do that until it’s dead and buried.”

Beyond the political circus, they wonder if a wider change is at hand. Is Trump proof that the old playbook is gone?

“Most people would tell you for decades that it’s a death sentence to … [do something like] challenge a female broadcaster on TV by suggesting she’s menstruating from her eyes,” he said. “This is the sort of act that would have ended a candidacy before, but that candidate would have recognized that they had transgressed.”

“There was quite a bit of the ‘dumpster fire’ at the start,” says former Harper PMO director of communications Andrew MacDougall. “Now it’s more macabre fascination.”

“All of my friends and me that watch this stuff…everybody kind of wondered: when is he going to professionalize his operation? And the answer appears to be never.”

Part of that comes from Trump’s colouring outside of the political lines when attacking his opponents, addressing policy issues and, well, just talking.

“[Trump] calls her ‘crooked Hillary’…or ‘lying Ted Cruz’. What political candidate has ever maligned an opponent that directly in a campaign before?”

“When your opponent’s a grease fire like he is, how do you fight it?”

He said it just shows how politics has become so proscribed and formulaic.

“No one’s ever tested what really happens when you just ignore all the rules, and it’s a bit exciting to people when you see someone not obeying the rules.”

Looking at the Republican convention, it was definitely not a normal year: Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio stayed away – Ted Cruz dumped on Trump – and the Republican governor of the state hosting the convention didn’t even attend.

“It just felt like the last hurrah,” MacDougall said. “The Democrats felt like more of the same…well- organized convention. But does that matter anymore? Do political parties matter anymore? I think there are bigger questions than this that apply to the UK and Canada as well, but questions like ‘will politics be conducted through main line traditional parties, or are we going to see a realignment of politics into more issues based campaigns, insurgents, outsiders…is the professional political class out of time?’ That’s what it feels like to me.”

Insiders all said Trump successfully taps into the political undercurrent of resentment – people feeling put off by globalization, their representation, and the political class writ-large – contrasting starkly against politics-as-usual, insider Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

While MacDougall and Reid said the campaign isn’t an anomalous moment, Robyn Sears, an NDP veteran and now principal at Earnscliffe, says he hopes this election’s tone is a one off – but thinks deep fissures will remain within the Republican party no matter what the outcome is.

He pushed back a bit to the idea that Trump’s bombast necessarily means a long-term change, in part because American politics always has its carnival/spectacle aspects – this just turned up to 11. Compared to Canada’s political culture, America is louder, more aggressive, vigorous, more colourful – always.”

“You have to put a filter on, or adjust your thinking to so as not to overreact to it. … John McCain said some pretty stupid things,” Sears said. “Sarah Palin said some stupider things … They’ve run some pretty offensive political rhetoric that’s shown up on the convention floor.”

“This year is worse, granted…this is a new low point. We’ll have to see what happens.”

To Bill Fox, formerly of Mulroney’s PMO, a celebrity-bizarro candidacy like Trump’s has been a longtime coming. Blame the media, he says.

“I can’t help but think of the late Neil Postman whose seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, fundamentally predicted Trump. As did Daniel Boorstin 20 years before that.”

Postman’s book, for instance, cautioned that the mainstream media environment is becoming increasingly simplistic, and can only communicate complex ideas in a superficial manner.

“These scholars presaged all of this…they told us this was an absolute consequence of substituting entertainment for information,” he said.

“The reason I worry about it is it’s like a post-informed debate. If you know something, you’re suspect,” he said.

In a similar vein of media criticism, meantime, Reid cautioned to watch for overly-simplistic language – like Oliver’s trash fire quote – describing and ultimately underestimating what’s going on.

“It’s a very loaded, prejudicial phrase to call it a train wreck or a dumpster fire,” he said. “They’re saying: this is an inexplicable phenomenon that can’t be recreated and occurred due to unique circumstances, and they’re trying to comfort themselves. But we know none of that. For all we know this will re-write some of the standards and practices and mechanisms for campaigning.”

“That’s not analysis. That’s coping.”

So according to Canadian political elite, what’s the consensus on what the unusual 2016 campaign mean to future politics, here and elsewhere? To borrow one of Trump’s favourite lines: we’re looking into it.