Last week was a week of transformations in this despairing political season.

First, The Pumpkin King performed his first political punt. While on the campaign trail, Donald  Trump once invited Caitlyn Jenner to visit any of his properties and squat in whichever bathroom she preferred, a revolutionary gesture from the party of “It’s Adam & Eve, Not Adam & Steve”. Last week, however, while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live,  Trump reversed course slightly and declared that poo-poo and wee-wee is a state’s rights issue that should be left to local neanderthals to decide. Someone must have must told him that he’ll have to bend the knee to those Southern states after all if he wants to be the boss. This is Trump finally acting “presidential”.

So, a win for the GOP establishment. Bathroom prejudice, extinct as a national agenda item since the era of MLK, is back and ready to embarrass conservatism once again.

But last week also marked a turning point in the Democrats perception of the race as well, at least in this observer’s opinion. I do not know exactly what the triggering event was, just as no one can tell which bird is steering a flock as you watch it dip and dive through the air in choreographed fashion, but in one day both my mother and a close friend communicated their grave concern that Hillary is not going to pull off a victory in November. Perhaps owing to Hillary’s forceful declaration that there is “no way” she won’t be the Democratic nominee, the reality of Trump’s omnipresence and the Left’s collective ambivalence toward Her Nibs crashed like a wave in their minds, and the possibility of a President Trump suddenly leapt from nightmare to reality.

In the immortal words of Scooby Doo: Ruh-roh.

The entirely foreseeable mistake the Democratic party made in throwing its weight behind the unliked and unprincipled human dart board that is Hillary Clinton is now bearing its fruit. The only silver lining to hope for is that Donald, who gobbled up his competition faster than Pac-Man on meth, may tire himself out delivering crotch kicks to Hillary before July’s Democratic convention. Then she can stagger, bloody, into Philadelphia to receive her laurels.

I am actually stunned at the ferocity of Trump’s viciousness with six months still left before the election. Without even allowing for the brief hope that this campaign will be based on anything resembling a competition of ideas and leadership skills between the two parties’ nominees, Trump has come out of the gate with a blitzkrieg attack, resurrecting conspiracy theories about the death of former Hillary associate Vince Foster and blasting Hillary’s cred as a defender of women’s dignity, going so far as to call out Bill Clinton as a rapist. (Under normal circumstances, it would seem fitting for the press to demand to know why, then,  Trump donated hundreds of thousands of dollars  to the alleged swine for over a decade. But the media must have by now abandoned all hopes of pinning the man down on matters of credibility that would already have any other candidate flying to Russia to room with Edward Snowden.)

The Trump strategy is bound to work in the short term, as he raises subject after subject that are so toxic Hillary cannot hope to fire back lest she be forced to answer uncomfortable questions which would send her into one of her frequent coughing fits. Trump, the remorseless pig, does indeed have her number. And what exactly can she come back at him with? Scuzz is the man’s meat and drink. And trying to outshine him with her qualifications is a non-starter as well. Trump just doesn’t do policy.

Hillary’s only hope, unless Trump lifts his shirt to reveal a missing dragon scale that she can fire an arrow into, is that with so much time left before the election the population will sicken of Donald’s meanness or–dare I dream?–realize that the man is a genuine imbecile on the topics most likely to affect their lives. Then, with our heads clear, we can select either a game show host or an exemplar of Beltway cronyism to represent our American Dream.

Zoinks.