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Prediction: look for O’Leary to remain safely in TV land, piling up cash, while throwing his weight behind an established politician. He would be mad to do otherwise, given the catastrophes Trump and another famously loose-lipped maverick, Britain’s Boris Johnson, have visited on their constituencies, and their reputations, this year.

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The latter played a seminal role in levering the U.K. into Brexit, a breathtakingly stupid backward turn that has hammered the British pound to historic lows and may lead to the dismantling of Europe and the U.K. both. Trump, for his part, has ripped the party of Reagan, Eisenhower, Colin Powell and the Bushes down to the studs in the space of six months.

Late Wednesday, Trump is reported to have declared “all-out war” on his opponents and the media after multiple accounts of his having groped or forcibly kissed women. The first salvo in this apocalyptic conflict-to-end all-conflicts was a letter to The New York Times, threatening a lawsuit for defamation, failing a retraction.

There will be no retraction. These claims are on the record, with names attached. There is voluminous detail. There are multiple corroborating sources and similar claims in other publications. And there are Trump’s own words, caught on a 2005 video, in which he boasts that, being a star, he can “do anything” he likes to women, including “grab’em by the pussy.”

In the unlikely event any of this winds up in a civil court, following the required legal filings, it will be a matter of whom the judge or jury chooses to believe. By then this presidential campaign will be a bad memory, the Clintons back in the White House and Trump a regular on alt-right talk radio or retired in sulky splendour to his penthouse. The bigger question – whether the Republican party itself can bounce back, or whether the chasms Trump has opened cause it to crack into pieces, remains to be seen.