Based on the narrowing polls, and absent any other explanation for it, I’m afraid that a Trump victory is more or less the default outcome for U.S. elections. Unless something’s done to fix it, we could permanently become a nation that elects despots and freaks similar to the Republican nominee.

Within our present system, a reality-show demagogue can parlay his tabloid popularity into a run for president. He can win the nomination by appealing to the basest, cruelest, most simplistic instincts of reactionary voters who are too ignorant and lazy to understand the wonky details of public policy and who are mostly brainwashed from within an impermeable bubble in which a limitless geyser of misinformation and propaganda, carefully designed and crafted to tap into the reptilian brains of the poorly educated and easily influenced, has successfully deceived enough voters to openly support this destructive character.

He can emerge from the nominating process more or less unscathed, even though he’s blundered into an ongoing series of fatal errors, multiple times per day, then, a few days later, he can somehow gain in the polls simply by not blurting as many racist, insensitive things as he did when he was badly trailing the Democratic nominee.

He can literally sidestep every standard by which all other candidates are expected to achieve, and the news media, along with a frustratingly large chunk of the voting public, will give him a pass anyway. Again, he can say a million things that no other candidate could possibly get away with, and never has, and because the news media has been rendered flaccid before the false accusation of liberal bias, the existential threat he poses — the urgent relating of facts that’d easily disqualify him — takes a back seat to horse-race narratives and smirky roundtables in which, inexplicably, Bill Kristol, who’s always wrong about everything, pops up on the liberal network, MSNBC, because who the hell knows.

Worse, and as the polls seem to indicate, this clownish American embarrassment can still win most of the same states won by previous Republican nominees, despite being a proud dilettante — a politically drunken myrmidon with punchline hair. And this amateur will continue to be evenly compared and contrasted with a woman who’s objectively lightyears more qualified to be chief executive of the world’s last superpower. Yet qualifications and conspicuously vast differences are irrelevant when there’s an equivalence quota to fill on cable news.

Even though the Democrats still have a superdelegate firewall, and, by the way, the electoral college was designed by the Framers in part to expressly stymie outlier candidates, the GOP nominating process is without a mechanism to prevent another Trump from getting this far despite himself. The Republican Party needs to devise a firewall now. I mean, right fucking now. If nothing else, Trump’s success underscores how the superdelegate system and the electoral college as they exist today are, obviously, crucial to the future of democracy. Without a stopgap on both sides to prevent populist weirdos from getting this far on the backs of screaming yokels and impressionable fanboys, we’re vulnerable to many more Trumps. And if you think there can’t be a Democratic Trump, you’re very wrong. Sadly, however, there are enough Americans with voting privileges who would choose a crazy-bomb like Trump, and this has to be the last time.