COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA—So, for the last time as a presidential candidate in his life, John Ellis Bush disappeared behind a black curtain, stage right. Nothing so much became his campaign as the way he ended it—in a sparsely filled hotel ballroom, with a gentle shrug of the shoulders and exhaling a soft cloud of defeated banalities. He was the wrong candidate in the wrong place in the wrong year. Of course, so were Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, and Carly Fiorina. But nobody was more the wrong candidate in the wrong place in the wrong year than was Jeb (!) Bush, who was born to be the primary punching bag for a violently unsettled political time and for its principal embodiment, a vulgar talking yam with a supreme instinct for the zeitgeist. He was perfectly cast for that role, and he played it almost perfectly, his lost campaign perfectly encapsulated by a sad moment two weeks ago.

It was a town hall in New Hampshire, and Bush was pitching himself as a formidable commander-in-chief. (The event was ill-omened from the start. The lights kept going out in the hall.) He came rounding into his peroration. The crowd sat there, very politely.

I won't be out there blowharding, talking a big game without backing it up. I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter, but send a signal that we're prepared to act in the national security interests of this country, to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world.

(Deep breath. Is this an audience or an oil painting?)

Please clap.

He spent gobs of money. He hired all the best people. He had the name and the pedigree. And every one of those conventional credentials were turned against him as vehicles for mockery and derision by He, Trump, the wild-card for whom nobody had planned. Trump mocked Bush's spending for its lack of results. Trump mocked Bush's campaign for its lack of results. Trump mocked Bush himself for being low-energy, and for his lack of results. Meanwhile, Bush and his campaign worked day and night to lend obvious substance to every charge levelled by He, Trump.

Please clap.

He should have dropped out right at that moment.

(Do not make the mistake of thinking that I sympathize in any way with the sad political destruction of Jeb (!) Bush—except, of course, in the sense that it makes the presidency of He, Trump more of a possibility—because I still remember how, out of raw political ambition, he made the lives of a lot of good people miserable. Fuckabuncha him forever for having done that.)

Now, though, Jeb (!) is merely the symbol of a political party and a nominating process gone truly rogue, burning and consuming itself, using itself as its own fuel like some great breeder reactor of rage and fear. Bush, like all the members of the now vestigial Republican "establishment," who spent 30 years developing the perfect context for something like the Trump campaign to occur, was stunned into incoherence when it actually happened. Watching him in his farewell on Saturday night was to recall what Abraham Lincoln said about General William Rosecrans after the Union's defeat at Chickamauga; Rosecrans, Lincoln mused, was "confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head."

Some people saw it coming. Jim and Sadie Hartman, who live about six blocks from the rapidly emptying ballroom, worked for George H.W. Bush in 1980 and in 1988. They worked for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. And they worked for Jeb (!) this time around. But they also sensed something new and unfamiliar that seems to have eluded the high-priced brain trust of the most recent Bush campaign until it was far too late to do anything about it.

"They represent the character that I want as president and as leader of my country. They have strong Christian values," Jim Hartman said. "They stand for what they believe. They don't waffle and they get the job done.

"I think two things happened. The first is that the world has shifted to this momentum, this non-politically correct momentum that Donald Trump has got. His money is magic to the world, and I don't think the world wanted a third Bush. I think that's what the problem was. He is not a combative person. He can't take Trump on toe-to-toe, and he can't overcome three Bushes in the White House. South Carolina didn't support him like they did his father and brother."

And now that momentum has become fearfully strong. Trump won all 44 of the state's delegates to the national convention next summer. Ted Cruz, who essentially ran on the Leviticus-Deuteronomy ticket, found even his evangelical support bleeding to Trump, a phenomenon that indicates that the evangelical voters of South Carolina are a bit savvier and a bit more calculating than their cousins in Iowa. Even if you add Bush's votes to those of Marco Rubio, who posted another triumphant third-place finish, Rubio still loses to Trump pretty handily. (Of course, Rubio has now picked up the endorsement of political juggernaut Willard Romney.) Amazingly, it still seems that a substantial number of influential Republicans are trying to wish away what is plainly going on all around them. Rubio, for example, in his triumphal address as the show horse once again, declared that "the children of the Reagan revolution" are taking over.

He was more right than he knows. The children of the Reagan revolution are older than Marco Rubio believes they are, and they're lining up behind Donald Trump. They like the way he defines the enemy, the way that Reagan always knew when to summon up that spectral welfare mom, or that imaginary black man buying steaks with his government checks. They like the way he builds a comfortable wall around them to hold back the change that scares them so. They like the way he makes them part of a movement against their fear and how he so embodies their confusion and rage. Look at this perfect distillation of the kind of modern conservative rhetoric that comes trippingly off his tongue. The subject was the president's not attending the funeral mass for Justice Antonin Scalia.

"I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a Mosque? Very sad that he did not go!"

In that, you can hear echoes of how kindly old President Dutch smilingly nudge-nudge-wink-wink'd about Michael Dukakis' mental state back in 1988. The forces unleashed in conservative America by Reagan's smiling demagoguery have gathered themselves into a whirlwind that blew away the last Bush brother on Saturday night. Yes, Young Marco Rubio, it's morning in America again, and it's a darker day than you can possibly imagine.

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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