Finally. After MONTHS of the media milking overblown controversies while giving Donald Trump and his cronies a free pass, of ridiculous and untrue statements from the Trump campaign, of absurd and sexist scrutiny about Hillary’s health, Tuesday’s debate is her chance to turn the tables on Trump and rip him and his flimsy proposals to shreds. Here’s how:

We’ve known all along that there’s only one candidate who understands the issues and will take the presidency seriously, and it sure as heck ain’t the guy who’s been blowing off any sort of debate prep . The whole country will watch Hillary clearly and effortlessly articulate the specifics of her proposals while Trump continues to avoid explaining how he’s going to get his wall built, and they’ll see that Trump’s proposals are just a bunch of thin air.

Plus, the moderators will press Trump harder than ever before. After the furor surrounding Matt Lauer’s failure to fact-check Trump during NBC’s commander-in-chief forum and Jimmy Fallon’s dangerously positive interview with Trump , you can be sure that the moderators won’t let any lies or distortions go unpunished.

Now that I think about it, though, it’s not like the moderators will have all that much time to work with. The format for the first debate only allows about 15 minutes per topic, in which each candidate gets two minutes to answer each question. And with only 90 minutes total, the moderators will be wary of burning up time with fact-checking.

And, if they go after Trump, however legitimately, he’ll pile on them for being “biased”, and then that will become a whole thing, and then forget the issues, right?

BUT, even if the moderators stay hands-off, Donald Trump is going to be more exposed than he’s ever been. In the Republican primaries, Trump usually shared the debate stage with about ten other candidates, and even in the very last debate he was one of four candidates onstage. But now, the spotlight will be squarely on him, in front of the largest debate audience in history, and he won’t be able to cruise by while his rivals go for each others’ throats. And you can bet Hillary will be locked, loaded, and ready to unleash both barrels at him.

…but what if Hillary blows her chance to go on the offensive? What if she has a chance for a “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment , but flubs the wording like she did with her “basket of deplorables” comment , and it comes across as so distinctively awkward that it provides instant fodder for her opposition?

And what’s it say about us that we’re so worried about how she’ll say things? I mean, Trump felt compelled to assure us that his penis was normal-sized in one of the GOP debates. Why are we so obsessed over here with Hillary’s word choice?

Sexism’s the obvious answer, but I don’t think it’s just that. If Hillary has a “basket of deplorables” moment tonight, that’ll probably be all we talk about on Tuesday. And yet Trump’s had a zillion moments like that, and unless he actually vomits all over the stage, we’ll probably be saying that he did better than we feared. Makes it easy to buy the “the media is going easy on Trump because a close and controversial race will drive their ratings” narrative, huh?

And I haven’t even mentioned Hillary’s controversies. The email scandal may be overblown as hell, but it’s still a big issue for a lot of people, and if Trump (or *gulp* the moderator) latches onto it and puts Hillary on the defensive, it would distract from his own shortcomings.

And you know the media will leap on that.

And even if that doesn’t happen, Hillary’s not quite the polished, charismatic candidate that her husband or Obama were, and it’s easy to believe that she might make mistakes in a debate that they wouldn’t.

But things like charisma and polish shouldn’t count for more than Trump’s many failings. Even leaving aside sexism, confirmation bias, and any other psychological factors that might affect the public perception of Hillary’s speaking, the media has long elevated charisma and polish above matters of substance.

Not to mention that it’s perverse to critique Hillary’s lack of polish when her opponent is the greatest bullshitter I’ve seen since my freshman anthropology precept.

And yet I find myself doing just that.

Plus, Hillary’s had, like, 25 years to figure this stuff out. Maybe the fact that she hasn’t is less an indictment of the media than it is of her personally.

Or of the Democratic Party, which I have long held does a far worse job of leveraging the media to spread its message and defend its representatives from opposition attacks than has the Republican Party.

And that failure by the party apparatus opened the door for a right-wing propaganda machine to smear her and her husband for the past 25 years, clearly successfully. And there’s no denying this has affected the preconceptions and doubts we all carry when we engage with Hillary on any level.

And given that people perceive things through the filter of their expectations, articles like this one only perpetuate these preconceptions by sowing more doubt about whether Hillary can succeed.

And by sowing that doubt, what people might otherwise have applauded, they instead see as her failure. Heck, this is fundamentally a pro-Hillary article and it still probably weakens her position.

There is no escaping the Hillary doubt. It is always here, always growing.

It has no beginning and no end. It is everpresent, gigantic, an Ouroboros eating its own tail.

But there could have been no Hillary doubt before there was Hillary. Therefore, Hillary has always been, and will always be.

Hillary is forever. She is eternal. She is our beginning and our end. She was here long before us and she will remain long after us.