Seen with a little perspective, it is clearer than it has ever been that the bipartisan political establishment that governed at Washington after the retirement of Ronald Reagan, the OBushintons, as I have often described them here, were caretakers coasting on Reagan’s coattails, until President Obama made race the principal criterion and motivation of public policy. 

In foreign affairs, he told large audiences at Cairo and in Ghana that they had had difficulties with America as a white Christian country, but all that was in the past now that America was governed by a non-white president with a partially Islamic background. 

Practically all sense of national interest was jettisoned in favor of the naïve fantasy that white Christian notions of superiority were the chief sources of the world’s problems. Domestically, American politics was atomized into aggrieved groups whose collective rights were politically promoted as enjoying precedence over the concept of individual rights upon which the United States was founded and flourished.

As the Obama era ended, it was confidently expected that we would return to the Clintons (Hillary) or the Bushes (Jeb). Donald Trump was practically the only person in America who seems to have sensed correctly that approximately half the population was disgusted with what they thought had become a log-rolling, back-scratching operation at Washington, an entirely Democratic city where the Republicans resembled the Democrats, and the regime anesthetized the disadvantaged with a corrupt welfare system while the country was governed for the benefit of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. 

In 2016, Trump rudely interrupted the status quo that had obtained since 1980, when for 36 years, one member of the Bush or Clinton families was either president, vice president, Secretary of State, or preparing to be their party’s nominee for president.

So great was the shock at Trump’s election, that there arose at once a determination to profess that it was an illegitimate election, to harass, to resist, and immobilize and discredit Trump’s administration, to criminalize policy differences, and, in 2020, to exploit the Covid pandemic to alter voting and vote-counting rules.

These changes enabled the expedition of scores of millions of ballots to voting lists that are inevitably partially outdated at all times because of people dying and moving, and raised concerns about ballot harvesting and the verifiability of the ballots cast. 

For reasons that historians of the future will need to identify, the national political press, including even those few outlets that were reasonably civilized to Trump, locked arms in support of the righteous complaint that it had been a pristine election. Trump was outspent two to one, and opposed by 95 percent of the national political press, but if 44,000 votes had flipped in Pennsylvania and two other states, he would have won in the electoral college.  

The Democratic and Never Trump Republican coalition only prevailed by elevating an unfrightening and allegedly innocuous candidate for president, with a vacuous vice president whose own campaign flamed out before the primaries began and who was chosen as the only non-white woman that the party elders thought might appease those voting blocs. 

And President Biden and Vice President Harris were set on top of Bernie Sanders’s socialist program, to compensate the Vermont senator for being robbed of the nomination as too far left to win: a senescent figurehead, atop a quasi-Marxist electoral platform. 

From the start, it was a Potemkin village of a government, a carnival fun-house illusion, for which the national political press turned itself inside out pretending that a fair election had elevated a competent president and an acceptable vice president on a platform that would generate “progress.”

As the circumstances of this pantomime horse of a government became more and more strained, and it failed miserably in every major policy area, multiplying Trump’s inflation rate by seven, admitting as many as 15 million illegal migrants who dangerously overstrained the education and welfare systems of the country and helped sharply raise the crime rate, and imposed a green tyranny that strangled large parts of the economy.

The inept Biden-Harris foreign policy produced the horrifying debacle in Afghanistan and has never given the Ukrainians what they need to win. Having assumed at the outset that Ukraine would be easily defeated, they have pursued a policy of fighting to the last Ukrainian.                  

Underestimating Trump still, they thought they could afford to renominate Mr. Biden in 2024 until he cognitively disintegrated in an early debate. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama pressured him to step aside, even while Mrs. Pelosi described him as “a president for Mount Rushmore.” 

Mr. Biden’s last little effort at defiance was to release his delegates to his vice president and impose her on the Democratic Party as their candidate. Up to this point, two-thirds of Americans found her an embarrassment as vice president, but the press rallied again and acclaimed that a vapid, mindless, climate of  “joy” had been created.

Finally, it is becoming clear that the instant reinvention of Ms. Harris will not stop the cascading doubts over the 2020 election: the incumbent president is already a trivia question; the vice president will not be able to get through six more weeks to the election concealing her colossal inadequacies. As this becomes more obvious, the collapse of this immense and outrageous political house of cards will accelerate. P.T. Barnum has already been vindicated; soon the founders of the country and authors of the Constitution will be also.