In any reasonably sober season, the Donald Trump Presidential campaign, that odious thing, would be a pig so dead by now that even David Cameron wouldn’t dare penetrate it. 

But it’s 2015, a time of the anti-politician. Gerrymandering has left us without a true representational government as well as the inability to get much accomplished across aisles, and Citizens United has made people feel someone else owns the process, even if billionaires have yet to see a return on their investments on the national stage. If the situation is to normalize, those systemic failures need be amended, and it’s going to have to happen without Lessig-ish gimmicks. How to get to there from here?

Meanwhile, a nation that considers absolutely everything entertainment has a Reality TV racist to “shake things up,” whatever that means. In “Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere,” the great Mark Leibovich of the New York Times wonders about the new abnormal as he profiles the fascist combover in mid-stream. The opening:

“I don’t worry about anything,’’ Donald J. Trump told me aboard his 757 as we were flying to the recent Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. He was dividing his attention between the brick-size slice of red-velvet cake he was annihilating and the CNN commentator on the 57-inch television who at that moment was talking about Trump, as most commentators have been at pretty much every moment for the last three months. The commentator, Dylan Byers, was saying that Trump now ran the risk of ‘‘jumping the shark’’ because voters were becoming so familiar with his act. ‘‘Nah,’’ Trump said, smirking at the screen. As the real estate and reality-­show tycoon sees things, this is all win-win for him. Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal wrote something to this effect recently, Trump told me, explaining that even if he loses, ‘‘he goes back to being Donald Trump, but even bigger.’’ 

The Trump campaign may be a win-win for Trump, but it is a monstrous dilemma for a lot of other people. It is a dilemma for the Republican Party and a dilemma for the people Trump is running against. They would love to dismiss him as a sideshow and declare his shark jumped, except he keeps dominating the campaign and the conversation, and they have no clue whether to engage, attack, ignore or suck up in response. It is a dilemma for the elected leaders, campaign strategists, credentialed pundits and assorted parasites of the ‘‘establishment.’’ They have a certain set of expectations, unwritten rules and ways of doing things that Trump keeps flouting in the most indelicate of ways. And, of course, it is a dilemma for the media, who fear abetting a circus. This is why The Huffington Post announced in July that it would publish stories about Trump only in its ‘‘entertainment’’ section, so that when it all ended, as it surely would soon, the website could remain pristine and on the side of the high-minded. A similar sort of worry prevented me from writing about Trump throughout his rise this summer. Initially, I dismissed him as a nativist clown, a chief perpetrator of the false notion that President Obama was not born in the United States — the ‘‘birther’’ movement. And I was, of course, way too incredibly serious and high-­minded to ever sully myself by getting so close to Donald Trump.

I initially doubted that he would even run.•