(Mandatory Musical Accompaniment To The Rest Of The Campaign Season)

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—I thought about stopping by the press conference Wednesday afternoon that was being held by Deney Williams, the young man claiming to be the love child of Bill Clinton, but nobody in town seemed to know where it was being held, and the people from the Trump campaign would have jumped into the lagoon in front of the Venetian before they'd own up to it. Of course, even if the Trump campaign had not sponsored Williams' appearance, it clearly had sponsored the lunacy that brought him into the 2016 presidential campaign. But this was something that was so transparently crazy that not even the people in Las Vegas wanted any part of it.

Prior to Wednesday night, the Trump campaign clearly had handed over the whole effort to the unquiet ghosts of Bedlam past. There were the four ladies in St. Louis. Now, for the last debate of the campaign, the Trump campaign trotted out the president's crank of a half-brother, who actually is from Kenya; the angry mother of a man killed during the firefight in Benghazi; and Deney Williams, whose paternity claim against the former president was settled rather definitively by a DNA test in 1999.

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Meanwhile, Trump political advisor Alex Jones hosted a segment with Larry Nichols, one of the all-purpose Arkansas con-men on whom so many influential reporters relied during the Great Penis Hunt of the 1990s. All the day lacked was a liveshot from Parker Dozhier's fish camp, a stand-up in the cocktail lounge of the Mena Airport, and a wax facsimile of Vince Foster—or, perhaps, the actual body itself. I put nothing past these people at this point.

It's long past time to stop giving a moment's pause to the question, "What in the hell is Trump thinking?" It doesn't matter any more. He's determined to turn everything about the American political system into a low farce. He's giving the gap-toothed, male-enhancement goobers of the talk-radio backwoods the imaginary triumph over the evil Clintons that they believe they were denied in 1998 when the whole impeachment kabuki fell apart on them. He's put together his ultimate TV show—a Celebrity Apprentice for superannuated ratfcking political ne'er-do-wells.

That being said, I didn't have the faintest freaking idea what was going to happen in Wednesday night's debate. Anyone who tells you they did is lying to your face. There simply is nothing that Trump can do between now and November 8 that could possibly surprise anyone. The 2016 presidential campaign is a shambolic mess right now because that is what the Republican nominee has sought to make it ever since he looked down a stage in Cleveland at the very first primary debate, took a long, measuring look at the other 16 feckless representatives of that vaunted deep Republican bench and thought, "I can sell these guys aluminum siding that's made of Styrofoam." Then he looked out into the audience and saw the same thing.

In 1828, the campaign between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams got so vile at its margins that Adams, an inveterate diarist his entire life, simply left the pages of his journal blank between August and Election Day. His supporters claimed Jackson was a wife-stealing bigamist. Jackson's supporters claimed Adams had worked as a pimp in the court of the Tsar in Russia. But never in his wildest dreams, I suspect, did Jackson think of bringing a hooker from Kiev to sit for an interview. And it never occurred to Adams to trot out Rachel Jackson's absent first husband and put him in the East Room of the White House. Of course, had he done that, Jackson might have challenged him to a duel and shot him.

Things were so much simpler then.

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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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