What happened in the debate Thursday night was so inexplicable in so many respects that it’s hard to know what we watched. An event featuring Donald Trump will be remembered almost entirely for quotes by Joe Biden, from “We finally beat Medicare” to the 32 (reportedly) uses of “The idea!” to the word salads about in-law rape and “the total initiative relative to what we’re going to with Border Patrol” and many other moments.

It is hard to believe that Biden’s circle didn’t know this was going to happen. It’s not particularly easy to believe in a scenario in which he was intentionally thrown in a wood-chipper as a trigger for this seemingly coordinated assassination last night and this morning. The scenario that makes the most sense to me at the moment is that Biden’s inner team thought they could pull this off — he’s survived so many previous tests, like the State of the Union — but a waiting gang of party vultures, led perhaps by figures from Chicago, decided to pounce mid-debate and put calls into media mouthpieces before the end of the event. This looked, in other words, like a genuine coup, with party figures agreeing in Shakespearean fashion to take frail Caesar out before his convention coronation.