Summer, 2015. Breaking every rule and shattering every established convention of electoral politics, the former host of TV’s The Apprentice launched a novelty campaign for president and soon found himself atop the polls. With growing desperation, conservative power brokers and media elites did everything they could to arrest his momentum, only to fall flat on their faces like a pack of yokels trying to tackle a greased-up hog. Against all odds, an increasingly demented Donald Trump breezily glided through the mud — passing by the entire clown car of consultancy-hatched Beltway clones assembled against him — and handily secured the Republican nomination for president.

Reality was supposed to reassert itself then and there. Overconfident and utterly convinced a general election victory was inevitable, irritated Democratic elites narrowly fended off an internal insurgency of their own and coronated Hillary Clinton as their tribune. No matter that Trump had effortlessly squashed each and every one of his establishment-friendly adversaries; no matter that he’d seemed impervious to conventional tactics at every turn; no matter that the country was visibly sliding into oligarchy and that populist rage was palpably in the air. Running explicitly as a proxy for the Beltway itself, Clinton opted to campaign as an ally of normalcy and continuity.

All three would go down in defeat on the eighth of November.