The focus, however, remains Trump, and Harris’ superpower may be an ability to bring out his worst and most vile traits. His misogyny. His racism. At a conference of black journalists overnight, he even questioned her black identity. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a black person,” he said of the vice president, whose mother was born in India and whose father hails from Jamaica.

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For Trump, this is a reversion to type. The showing of his true nativistic self. He made his political name, remember, as the untitled leader of the so-called birther movement, which questioned the very legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by promoting the specious and racist claim that he was not born in the United States. Trump is becoming more Trumpian, which is playing into Democrats’ hands.

At the risk of sounding like a party pooper, the Harris campaign would do well to remember that bacchanals can quickly be followed by hangovers. Bubbles burst. Not since 1968 – which saw the withdrawal of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the victory of Richard Nixon – have we witnessed a campaign in which history has come at us so thick and fast and in which storylines have changed with such manic suddenness.

After the failed assassination attempt on Trump and the instant iconography of his “fight, fight, fight” flag-bedecked fist pump, many Democrats were resigned to certain defeat. But this near-death experience, both for Trump and the Democrats, provided fresh impetus to blast out Biden.

Before his catastrophic debate performance, one of the strongest rationales for the 81-year-old president remaining as the party’s nominee was the widespread concern that his vice president would prove an even weaker candidate.

That, and the argument that “Scranton Joe” – a reference to the city of his upbringing in Pennsylvania – was best placed to win that state, along with Michigan and Wisconsin – the ones Trump unexpectedly took from the Democrats in 2016 but which Biden wrestled back four years ago.

Even now, after the success of the Harris rollout, an argument could be mounted that other Democrats, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, would perform better in the rust belt.

But the process of picking a stronger candidate through a messy contested convention obviously ran the risk of splitting the party. Besides, Kamala Harris is almost unrecognisable from the candidate who started so strongly in 2019 before ending her campaign with a whimper.

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Crucially, Harris offers the media a compelling new storyline. One of the strongest forms of partiality is better story bias, in which politicians offering the most journalistic entertainment value dominate the headlines.

Ultimately, though, American voters are the pen-holders when it comes to writing the next chapter. In this electoral cliffhanger, will “Kamalot” prove a more enticing prospect than a Trumpian restoration?

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

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