Illa in Manila: Will History Demand Trump-Hillary II?

Eight years of madness have brought America to the doorstep of its perfect WWE ending. Let's get ready to rumble

Politico yesterday cited a survey showing Hillary Clinton “slightly ahead” of Kamala Harris, leading Trump “43 percent to 41 percent.” The Hill followed up with an article that put Hillary’s name first in the headline, and noted that she outperformed a slew of other oft-mentioned candidates, including California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

Slowly, as if pulled by cats, the name of Hillary Clinton is making its way into editorial speculations about the Democratic nomination. My podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote the following on June 28th. Why won’t he be right?

Clinton-Trump II is the disgusting, lurid, embarrassing, corrupt, pornographic, score-settling, possibly cathartic cage-fight the country needs to have. Hillary is also the best candidate. She’s the closest thing to a true representative of her party’s attitudes. More than “defending democracy” or beating back “fascism,” the dominant concern of blue-party politics for years has been the urge to re-litigate the Great Disobedience. The interfering Putin for his insolence will already spend eternity awaiting a missile up the pipe, the Pentagon has thrown hundreds of millions at war with “fake news” and “disinformation” (whatever prompted your mistaken dislike of the candidate), and even long-tamed Bernie Sanders remains unforgiven while this error of history stands. Tom Nichols in The Atlantic wrote just last week:

Party elders, led by Barack Obama and assisted by others such as Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, could then convene a war council and talk to almost every interested candidate. (Almost. Maybe, for once, Bernie Sanders… could sit this one out.) The Democrats… need a smoke-filled room.

They finally have the smoke-filled room, and papers across the country have been busy making passionate arguments for perhaps the only conceivable scenarios that could end with Hillary Clinton as nominee: