1. LGBT marriage equality : Came SO fast, I don’t think people have processed it yet. As they are struggling to cope with this decidedly liberal agenda, the wedding cake mafia is not helping either. No one likes being held hostage to ideas in their own home/city/country.

Maybe some part of the electorate has always been paranoid. But like your reader [who saw the Trump-Pence bumper sticker] points out , this year seems a watershed. I can see some reasons:

Thanks for sharing the link! This is awesome! In just two minutes, I was able to answer a question that long bedeviled me: on Planet Trump, what are all the failing media operations? The answer:

So there’s a pretty rich irony in this whole metaphor: a voter who is frightened by threats that aren’t real, or aren’t statistically significant, trusts a protector who will not provide any meaningful protection, who will, in addition, make the voter more vulnerable. Trump has cheated employees, lenders, stockholders, charities, customers, and now he’s setting himself up to cheat his voters and supporters too.

A pro thief would carry a short piece of a hacksaw blade to cut through the plastic steering wheel in a couple seconds. They were then able to release The Club and use it to apply a huge amount of torque to the steering wheel and break the lock on the steering column (which most cars were already equipped with). The pro thieves actually sought out cars with The Club on them because they didn’t want to carry a long pry bar that was too hard to conceal.

In 1992, my most favorite car ever was stolen from the streets of New York City while protected by The Club. When I reported the theft to police and insurance, I learned that The Club is not a deterrent; it is actually an aid to car thieves. I didn’t grasp the details at the time, but as I was reading your post about the Trump-Pence car, I remembered how my confidence in The Club was disappointed and found this paragraph on Freakonomics:

This next email is a fascinating followup to the reader who saw a Trump-Pence bumper sticker on a car equipped with The Club and parked at a Hollywood studio—the kind of secure place where a security measure like The Club seems unnecessary at best:

It seems this passage from Lewis Carroll “fits” your Time Capsule: Alice laughed/said, “One can’t believe impossible things.” The Queen replied, “I daresay you haven’t much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ( Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 5 )

I appreciate your Trump Time Capsule serial, but I think you all have missed one. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am unaware of a presidential candidate ever releasing his (or her) testosterone level before ? Since Trump has released so little other health information, the message it sends is … I can’t find the words for it.

I’m helping my colleague Jim Fallows with some housecleaning regarding the massive amount of reader email piling up over Donald Trump. One notes for the record:

2. Globalization: Everyone else is doing SO much better (esp China?!). Our jobs have gone abroad, our towns devastated by meth epidemic, and all the Dems want to talk about is refugees and queers. (Totally ignores the real issue: looming automation that is going to suck up more jobs—self-driving cars?) 3. Black Lives Matter: The mostly white support base for Trump does not like being faced with facts such as police brutality. As long as it’s mostly black kids who get mowed down, it confirms their worldview that black kids are mostly thugs. BLM movement does not help its own cause when it moves from protest to looting and arson, feeding the thug narrative. 4. PC police: “microaggression,” “triggers,” “safe space,” “cultural appropriation.” I am an avowed liberal and I find this hard to stomach. Are we sending kids to college to prepare them for the world as it is, or not? While there is no cause to engage in deliberately insulting and provocative speech (n****r, f****t, and whatnot), chilling campus speech with Dolores Umbridge-like rules and committees is beyond the pale. 5. Spike in death rates of middle-aged whites: Was in the news recently and it was a head scratcher that no one (even NPR) wanted to talk about it other than as an “interesting aside.” 6. Immigration: Again, even as a liberal, I don’t agree with mindless immigration. America used to have enough resources and opportunities to welcome everyone’s tired, poor, huddled masses, but we are not that economy anymore. Perhaps UK’s Theresa May’s approach sounds brutal, but it is commonsense: get the immigrants who will help grow your economy. Here, that conversation is long due—not the Clinton-esque I love all immigrants or Trump’s “I hate all Muslims,” but a nuanced conversation debating the pros and cons and coming up with a comprehensive approach (not going to happen in our lifetimes). It’s been a long rant already, so I will stop by saying that all this is probably exacerbated by not having trustworthy, reliable, well-informed and principled media or news sources anymore. The New York Times (for me) lost all credibility post W’s wars. Newspapers have been atrophying and dying off. We are left with a babble of self-important idiots, tweeting their opinions. The loudest and crassest always wins, evidenced by Trump. You guys are good but mostly whistling in the wind.

Another reader also mentions the New York Times—specifically its long-time columnist Maureen Dowd:

FWIW, I listened to a Dowd interview on the Diane Rehm Show. It was transcendently awful. Among several howlers: Dowd made many definitive pronouncements on the characters of both Clintons, Trump, and Obama. Yet when a caller objected that her snarky, mean-girl tone, relativizing of the candidates, and general levity were inappropriate to a situation in which the norms of human decency were at stake, MoDo condescendingly suggested the caller didn’t know the difference between a journalist and a columnist, and refused to engage further on the matter. Another caller mentioned parallels with It Can’t Happen Here. Sinclair Lewis was one of the better-known American novelists of the past century, and the book is widely known. And in the last year, it would be virtually impossible to be closely engaged with the presidential campaign without running across references to the book (Google “Trump Sinclair Lewis” and you get 485,000 hits). MoDo had never heard of it.

Here’s one more reader trying to make sense of the Trump phenomenon:

I’ve considered yearning for power, the appeal of self-dealing at the highest level, and all sorts of motivations. And I’ve especially been stumped by Trump’s appeal to the masses. Really worked on that one and couldn’t come up with much. He pings the right tones for racists, homophobes, the afraid, and so on, but those things don’t really explain the broader appeal. The Trump Revealed book helped fill in some gaps but didn’t explain today’s situation. I’m a fairly smart guy with a 2+ hour daily commute, so I have a lot of time to think about this. But I think I’ve figured it out ... It is simply the striving to be the most famous person on earth. Nothing more or less. The common theme across everything I’ve read or observed about him says that Donald Trump wants to be the most famous person in the world, and that person of course is the president of the United States. How many Americans can name the Prime Minister of New Zealand? How many New Zealanders do you think know who Barack Obama is? As a pathological liar, nothing he says can logically made sensible. I don’t think he will even give a sideways glance to the “wall” or mass deportations or any of his promised acts if he’s elected. He’ll continue to lie and take credit for doing them anyway, or take credit for not doing them. Doesn't matter. He’ll move towards the next outrageous thing that will add to his fame. Or infamy. That’s his arc—it always has been. If he were to get elected, I predict impeachment or resignation within a year—as long as the circumstances bring even more publicity. And it explains his appeal. He’s Kim Kardashian, Kanye, Branjolina, Justin Bieber, and Madonna to the nth power. I’ve always felt a sense of of fandom in his flock. The same sense that makes the Red Sox the best team to Bostonians or causes people in DC to root for the Redskins in spite of Dan Snyder and RG III. They’re our team. We picked them and by God, we’re sticking with them no matter what they do. And when our team loses, it’s the bad calls, the other team cheating, the lightweights who didn’t pull their weight. Sound familiar? The elections are rigged unless he wins. The courts are skewed. It will always be the other guy’s fault. I’m gonna take a break from trying to think about this for a while.

If you have any thoughts yourself, drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a reader, Gail:

James Fallows is a hero for plowing through and creating some sense out of what is happening in our politics. I tried watching some of the comments [Monday] night and by the experts on received wisdom at Morning Joe for a few minutes. And I have long been trying to make sense out of what talking heads say about this being a change election. I think what they mean is “novelty.” That is the only way I can grasp the apparent appeal of the con artist whose name I will not use. (He has enough attention.) The reader who wrote that he wants to be the most famous person in the world is on to something. What about the many of us who want continued reasonable stability and who can’t believe the Obama years are about to end? Why doesn’t the talking head culture talk about us?

Here’s another reader, Renie:

Here’s what I still wonder after all this time (and after watching the terrible Frontline episode “The Choice” and reading the latest article on Ivanka Trump as Donald’s surrogate.) Why are women still enabling and excusing bad male behavior when the male in question is their husband or their father? If I were Ivanka Trump, I would think I would want to hide out in Outer Mongolia and never appear in public with her creep of a father or her equally creepy full brothers. He is so obviously ignorant and crooked and a liar. Why would she defend and ally herself with him? With Hillary, I just can’t imagine the level of humiliation she went through and why she accepted it. And I am close to her age so I’ve never bought the excuse that women of my generation were brought up to accept any level of bad male behavior from their husbands. Don’t get me wrong; I do believe that she is by far the better candidate and is an intelligent and strong woman and that there is no question of who should be president. I also don’t believe that she and Bill made a political deal. That would be rational and I don’t think this kind of behavior is entirely rational. And on a lighter but still serious note, imagine if “The Choice” episode had spent as much time on the Donald’s appearance and hair as it spent on hers. Just imagine the descriptions and the questions. When did he start dyeing his hair? Did he have hair implants? Was he wearing a rug at the time that Obama humiliated him? What about those ever ballooning suits? He even admits to a weight that puts him awfully close to obese. If he’s subtracting a typical amount, he’s actually well into the obese range. Why does a man of his appearance castigate women? So many questions that no one ever asks him.

Update from one more reader, promise:

Regarding Trump Time Capsule #119, his contractor quote (“Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work.”) seems to me like another example of the fundamental tension between the many claims that Trump has made about his business acumen and its applicability to the office of the President: his business record just doesn’t support a lot of these claims. From the $14 million starter loan to the number of times he’s filed for bankruptcy (“us[ing] certain laws that were there”), these things show someone whose skill is having a private safety net that allows him to get back on top after each miserable failure rather than someone whose decisions lead to success. His contractor defense has a similar problem: if people are supposed to believe that he won’t be a train-wreck president because of his ability to hire “the best people,” why are there so many examples of his hiring people whose work he found lacking? If he had stiffed a contractor or two, fine. Sometimes people do a bad job, and if you have the ability to express your dissatisfaction through not paying them, that’s within your rights. But by all appearances, he’s either (a) really bad at selecting contractors (i.e. has a horrible eye for the best people) or (b) using the threat of lawsuits to get out of paying money that he legitimately owes to the contractors that he hired, since “the best people” wouldn’t do work that he would find wanting. But also, it’s 2016 … nothing matters anymore.

Nihilist Arby’s agrees on that last point: