If Trump can spend the last month of the campaign showing some dignity as he focuses on policy issues and making regular but not excessive references to his theory that Clinton is running for the White House to avoid the jail house, he can still win. The venomous tone of the campaign among the entourages is more disturbing than the mud-slinging between the candidates. There is, after all, plenty of mud to sling, both ways. The self-justification of some of the intellectual conservatives who have defected to Clinton will cause durable fissures. In this election, Trump, though a moderate, and despite his stylistic lapses, which need hardly at this stage be highlighted, is the only quasi-conservative there is, and Clinton, though she is a capable and formidable woman, will flatline the economy buying votes for the public sector and will enthrone political correctness. Even in the debate on Sunday, when prodded, she declined to mention Islamist terror. The largely neoconservative intellectual Right has led even the Clintonians and defecting traditional conservatives in denouncing Trump as a primeval, knuckle-dragging monster, repulsive in every detail. As they toil for their ancient Clinton foes, they think, like many French World War II collaborators with the Nazis, that they are saving the integrity of their cause — in this case, thoughtful conservatism. They bewail the acceptance of Trump by other, allegedly less principled conservatives.

They have read themselves into oblivion. Because Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol came quickly and cogently from the soft left to the Reagan right, where they were graciously received, and blended well with the such traditional conservatives as Bill Buckley and even such paleoconservatives as Pat Buchanan, they earned some of the stardom of the great Reagan victories. Whichever party wins this election, the heirs of the Reagan intellectual Right who have noisily endorsed Hillary as the lesser of evils will be wearing sackcloth and ashes and speaking inaudibly in the wilderness for a long time. To the Democrats, they are useful idiots; to the Republicans, they are deserters in battle, turncoats. As Laura Ingraham said after the debate on Sunday, “They will go back to their think tanks and devise policies that will never be enacted unless those of us who are trying to defeat Hillary Clinton are successful.” Those of the conservative intellectual Right who have rallied to Trump, with reservations noted, and those who have sat it out discreetly, will have the task of rebuilding the intellectual Right. It will not be easy under either scenario.

It is good to remember that Donald Trump is not a monster and that Hillary Clinton is not a witch, and both surely would be better than the last two presidents, who by their failures have brought on this very nasty campaign. The election is now a bouncing (American) football and anything could happen.