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I did not intend to focus on Donald Trump. When I set out to cover the presidential race four weeks ago, I believed, like most people did, he was a passing fad: a punch line to a joke that didn’t realize it was already done. I thought I’d do a grand survey, a big look at America now.

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I did do some of that.

I went to Eldon, Iowa, home to the backdrop for American Gothic, the famous painting of the dour rural couple with pitchfork that has launched so many spoofs. It’s a tiny place, Eldon, and it’s getting tinier. The town used to have a packing plant and a railway hub, but now it has neither. Even the “Gothic House” draws only a straggle of tourists.

I also spent time in Flint, Mich., touring streets full of gutted houses and burned-out wrecks with a navy veteran turned Bernie Sanders super-fan. He left me with that month’s published list of tax foreclosures in the county. On newsprint, it’s as thick as the Sunday New York Times.

In Lexington, Ky., I had coffee with a political columnist on his last day on the job. He was leaving for a position in public relations, driven out, he said, by some combination of exhaustion, money and a sense that the game just wasn’t the same. “There used to be honour among thieves,” he told me. “There were some lies even a politician wouldn’t tell.”