Take the irony of Democrats putting forward Rep. Adam Schiff to argue the case that Jan. 6 all unfolded according to Mr. Trump’s master plan. Mr. Schiff’s own shortfall of character—along with Mrs. Clinton’s, Mr. Comey’s and Mr. Trump’s—was a crucial contingency helping to turn the voters’ Trump experiment into the dark chapter it didn’t need to be. Democrats clearly now hope to take advantage, on Mr. Schiff’s behalf, of the psychiatric propensity known as “splitting”—the unfortunately reliable assumption that, for certain viewers, blackening Mr. Trump whitens his enemies (in the Manichaean sense).

But we don’t live in a Manichaean world. We live in a Darwinian world. When reckless mendacity, cynicism and demagoguery paid off so handsomely for Mr. Trump, Democrats adopted them wholesale, and Mr. Schiff led the way. To me, this is still the most eye-opening revelation of the strange Trump interlude.

Mr. Trump’s moment landed arguably because he was a parody of the flaws of our political class, and some of his prominent non-crazy supporters sincerely argued only an ultra cynic could beat the Washington cynics at their own game and move the country forward on important fronts.

Has anything at all productive come from the experiment the electorate set in motion in 2016? Would we recognize it if it did?