This may or may not be an accurate depiction. Separately, aides told Politico that Trump’s team has constructed an elaborate psychological profile of Clinton that he’s using to prepare. It’s hard to tell what is a psych-out and what’s real, but the effect of the balance of these leaks is to present Trump as so bumbling that simply standing up straight is an achievement.

Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway is working the same jujitsu on reporters that Trump did on Holt, warning that reporters are biased against her nominee. It’s a no-lose proposition: Either reporters self-police, or else Trump’s supporters will simply write off anything they say as biased, regardless of the content.

But viewing this as the work of just a few weeks overlooks how important Trump’s entire campaign has been to creating this situation. Even if the Trump campaign hadn’t attacked Holt, made their candidate seem indifferent, and policed reporters, Trump the candidate has set the stage through his statements over the past 16 months.

Political reporting is heavily centered around two conventions. One, much remarked-upon and derided as “false equivalence” is the practice of comparing two things as like and like, even when they are not. A pair of Politico stories over the weekend, fact-checks of each candidate, offer an opportunity to see how to handle this right and wrong. As Donald Monynihan pointed out, reporters chided Clinton for a statement about how Trump’s tax plan would affect him because, they said, she was relying on Trump’s own, likely false, estimate of his net worth. On the other hand, Politico also concluded, “Trump’s mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton’s as to make the comparison almost ludicrous.”

A second, perhaps underrated convention is comparing a candidate to him- or herself. This is where Trump has truly excelled. Because he has said so man outlandish things—and because, as Salena Zito memorably put it recently, the press takes Trump literally but not seriously—reporters are ill-equipped to assess Trump against any sort of objective standard. It is certainly true that Trump is sui generis, and while that does not preclude detached analysis, it makes it very challenging.

An example of this dynamic was also on display over the weekend. After the Clinton campaign announced it was inviting billionaire Mark Cuban, a veteran Trump troll, to the debate, Trump announced that he had invited Gennifer Flowers, who had an affair with Bill Clinton decades ago. Flowers even confirmed that she was attending. It was then left to Conway and Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, to break the news that Flowers would not actually be there.

By the standards of almost any campaign, either of these moves would be bonkers: A presidential candidate inviting the former mistress of his rival’s husband to a debate, or the fact that he did so and then thought better of it and was forced to do a 180. By Trump standards, however, the whole episode elicited mostly weary shrugs: Seems about right.