Hillary Clinton barely exceeded 50 percent of the Democratic vote against the absurd socialist retread Sanders. The Bush-Romney-McCain society of Republican losers got 20 percent of the votes against Trump and Cruz. If the winner of this election doesn’t do better than the last two presidents, the succeeding occupant of the White House is likely to be well outside the thirty-yard lines and sound a lot like Sanders or Cruz, a specter that would justify the pyrotechnic frenzy many affect over Trump.

The game is up. Trump may not sound much like Washington or Lincoln or the Roosevelts or Reagan. But he is the only alternative to the incarnation of the decline and self-flagellation of America who is his Democratic opponent. Clinton would enthrone political correctness and flatline the economy. Unless Trump, who has been quite prudent in the last two weeks, succumbs to such mortal self-inflicted verbal blunderbuss wounds, and the biased, hopeless Washington press corps manages to brainwash and gender-modify scores of millions of despairing Archie Bunkers into shrieking Rachel Maddows, he will win. This long-running ascendancy of, in Cromwellian terms, “decayed servitors” cannot go on. And as Herb Stein famously averred, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper publisher whose most recent book is Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (Encounter Books, 2013). He is a member of the National Interest’s Advisory Council.

Image: “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks in front of a crowd on July 28 in Cedar Rapids. After talking briefly about becoming the nominee, Trump spoke about his plans to strengthen national security. ‘We have to get smart,’ said Trump. ‘We have to get very very tough.’” Photo by Max Goldberg, CC BY 2.0.