Trump seemed to remember that he was the anti-establishment candidate. And in this debate, he tied Clinton to that establishment’s failures over and over again. When moderators brought up Syria, he blamed the White House and Clinton for the humanitarian disaster, then tied her to the deplorable outcome of her favored Libya intervention and Iraq. When Clinton tried to bring up his taxes, he wasn’t churlish and petulant as he was in the first debate. Instead he essentially admitted the facts about his massive write-offs, and then said that they were legal. And further, that it was legal because Clinton’s donors want these loopholes to be legal. This is Trump at his most effective: I was playing by the rotten rules that crooked people like Hillary Clinton wrote. I will fix them for good.

But to say that it was a good night for Trump is not to say that it will halt his post-scandal fall in the polls. Or turn his campaign around. In fact, there may yet be more defections coming.

Trump began the night with zero expectations. The entire political class had tuned in to see if he would simply melt into the floor, or explode in unrestrained fury and poor taste. Instead, he did a serviceable version of his campaign’s greatest hits. Hillary is crooked. ObamaCare is a fraud. Our foreign policy is a disaster. I can fix the dirty laws that benefited me.