Aside from the possibility of declaring martial law or starting a nuclear war over a nasty tweet, Ross Douthat figures there are three “baseline dangers” from a Trump presidency:

• Sustained market jitters
• Major civil unrest
• Rapid escalation of risk in every geopolitical theater

This list demonstrates why the Republican Party was unable to stop Trump during the primaries: it could never come to grips with who he really is and what he appeals to. Conservatives, even reformish conservatives like Douthat, just won’t admit that the single biggest danger posed by Trump is that he has normalized a frighteningly unashamed race-based populism. They’ve never been willing to stomach the political cost of acknowledging this.

This is why Trump’s Republican opponents launched such feeble attacks on him. They couldn’t call him out for his racism because (a) he was just being a little more explicit about it than them, (b) it risked losing the tea party base, and (c) conservatives are not supposed to admit that racism exists. So Trump slid by, and then got clobbered by a Democrat who had no such constraints.

Trump has other appeals than just race. He’s got all the usual conservative hot buttons covered—taxes, abortion, Supreme Court justices, etc.—as well as a seductive pitch to the working class about bringing back their jobs. Nonetheless, race-based (and gender-based) resentment is clearly at the core of his campaign. If the Republican Party continues along the path of open white ethnocentrism that Trump has re-energized, it will be bad for the Republican Party and quite possibly devastating for the country. That’s the biggest risk of a Trump presidency.

Plus the nuclear war thing.

So how is America reacting to Comeygate? Let’s check in:

Look, I think Comey should have said prosecute her back in July.

But what he just did 11 days b4 the election is wrong & unfair to Hillary.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 31, 2016

Comey has lost Joe Walsh? Walsh is a guy who says stuff like this: “Illegals surging across the border. Again. 2 weeks before Election Day. Paying attention America?” And this: “White House won’t say if Obama will leave the country if Trump wins. He’ll probably leave. He’ll go back home.” But even Joe Effin Walsh thinks Comey has crossed a line.

In the meantime, standup comic Harry Reid, who moonlights as Senate Minority Leader, wrote a letter to Comey:

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.

By contrast, as soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible.

I wouldn’t count on any explosive news emerging about Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin, but this is A+ trolling from Reid. The only surprise is that Reid wrote a letter to Comey instead of a tweetstorm. But Reid is old school.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s hard to find anyone, Democrat or Republican, who approves of how Comey has handled this situation. Inside the FBI itself, Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal tells us that the Bureau is pretty much at war with itself. Long story short, there’s a whole swarm of agents in the field who are hellbent on digging up dirt on Hillary Clinton. Senior DOJ officials—civil servants, not political appointees—rolled their eyes when they got briefed on the state of their investigation, but the agents keep beavering away regardless, continually coming up empty. The Washington Post adds this nugget: “One person familiar with the matter said their presentation drew at least in part from media accounts over various foundation-related controversies.” Uh huh.

So either the field is full of rogue agents pursuing a vendetta against Hillary Clinton, or else the senior ranks of the Justice Department is full of political hacks who will stop at nothing to protect Hillary Clinton. Take your pick, I guess.

We’re into single digits, people. There are only 9 days left until the hellscape of this year’s presidential campaign ends. In the meantime, let’s play a game! Can you guess who the mystery man is in this story?

In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front. There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.

Then, all of a sudden…“There’s this kind of ruckus at the door…He just gets up on the podium and sits down.”…“Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ” Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.

Once he was onstage, he played the part of a big donor convincingly. Photos from the event show him smiling, right behind Giuliani, as the mayor cut the ribbon. During the “celebratory dance” segment of the program, he mugged and did the macarena with Giuliani, Kathie Lee Gifford and a group of children.

“I am just heartsick,” Buchenholz, the executive director, wrote the next day to the donor whose seat had been taken. Buchenholz provided a copy of the email.

What’s that? You all guessed Donald Trump? Seriously? All of you? Damn. And here I thought I was being so clever. But click the link anyway to read David Fahrenthold’s latest reporting on the almost pathological aversion to actual charity that has marked Donald Trump’s life.

Meanwhile, in the breaking news department, Comeygate is getting fishier and fishier. It’s already unclear why FBI Director James Comey decided to ignite a firestorm over a set of emails that nobody had read yet and quite possibly have nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. It’s also unclear why the FBI hasn’t yet gotten a warrant to go ahead and read the emails, something that most likely could be done in a few hours. Now there’s this:

The FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server knew early this month that messages recovered in a separate probe might be germane to their case, but they waited weeks before briefing the FBI director, according to people familiar with the case….Given that the Clinton email team knew for weeks that it may have cause to resume its work, it is unclear why investigators did not tell Comey sooner.

This is now getting beyond a case of mere poor judgment on Comey’s part. If the FBI knew about these messages weeks ago, they could easily have gotten a warrant and begun looking at them. If they were harmless—which I’m willing to bet on—Comey could then have either said nothing, or else made it clear that the emails were nothing new.

Instead, the Bureau sat on this for weeks; failed to get a warrant; and informed Comey only at the very tail end of a presidential campaign, when there wouldn’t be enough time to release any exonerating information before Election Day. And if published reports are accurate, Comey went public with this within ten days of an election—something that contravenes longstanding policy at the Department of Justice—because he basically figured he was operating under a threat that it would be leaked with or without him.

If you had material that was literally meaningless because no one had yet looked at it, but you wanted to make it sound sinister, this is how you would play it. Is that just coincidence? Beats me. But something smells very, very rotten here.

POSTSCRIPT: Still, let’s stay clear on something. The behavior of Comey and the FBI is somewhere between clueless and scandalous, but the behavior of the media has been flatly outrageous. Given what we know, there is simply no reason for this to have been a 24/7 cable obsession—or to command the entire top half of the front page of the New York Times. This massive amount of attention has been in the service of literally nothing new. Once again, though, when the press hears the words “email” and “Hillary Clinton” anywhere near each other, they go completely out of their minds.

I’ve been vaguely rooting for Cleveland in the World Series this year. Mostly this is because Cleveland is sort of a hard-luck city, and two championships in one year seems like a nice thing for them. But mostly it’s because of my deep insight into the true passion of Cubs fans. For example:

Taking my dad to Wrigley for the first WS there in 71 years only to watch a deflating loss was sort of perfectly appropriate for Cubs fans.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 30, 2016

If the Cubs won this year, fans would have to give up all this. No more lovable losers. No more humblebragging about how the Cubs always find a way to blow it. No more genuine bragging about not winning a World Series since the fall of the Roman Empire. No more generational bonding over stories about Cub incompetence.

And most important, no more uniqueness, the true source of Cub pride. If the Cubs won, they’d be just another team and next year would be just another year. That’s what happened in Boston. Now, the Red Sox are nothing more than another garden variety moneyball team. Before long they’ll probably move out to a shiny new billion-dollar sports palace in the suburbs. And why not? There’s nothing special about them anymore.

This could have happened to you, Chicago. But it looks like you’ve dodged that bullet. Congratulations!

With 10 days to go before Election Day, we are FUBARed. Have you heard? There are some emails. They are pertinent to something or other. But nobody has actually read them, so, actually, maybe they aren’t.

They are from Hillary Clinton to Huma Abedin. No, wait, they aren’t. Or maybe they are. No they’re not.

They are duplicates of emails we’ve already seen. No they aren’t. But maybe some of them are. Or most of them.

The FBI was legally required to inform Congress about these emails. No, just the opposite: it was an egregious breach of a longstanding Department of Justice policy of not announcing things that might affect a presidential campaign within 60 days of Election Day.

The emails are “bigger than Watergate.” They’re a nothingburger.

Jim Comey was in a no-win situation. No, he should have waited until he knew more.

Comey had no idea what effect his cryptic letter would have. Don’t be an idiot: he’s been in Washington for decades and knew exactly what effect it would have.

Sure, but he’s a standup guy. No, he’s a Republican hack and he’s trying to affect Republican chances in downballot races.

What an unbelievable cock-up. Are we really going to spend the last ten days of the election eagerly awaiting each new leak from “officials” at the FBI who might know things and might not? Seriously? After this election is over, Jim Comey should resign and then spend the rest of his life in a monastery reflecting on his failings.

This is a few days old, but the Atlantic asked eleven people to recommend three books each “to help make sense of the state of U.S. democracy.” Aside from one child’s book that I discarded, they ended up with 33 books. The recommenders included five people of color and six white people. Since I’m a chart guy, I have summarized the recommendations in the chart on the right.

I don’t have a big ol’ essay in me about this, but it’s pretty remarkable. If you want to understand America, people of color apparently think you need to read about race and people of color, but nothing much else. White people think you need to understand class, poverty, religion, and so forth, but nothing much about race or people of color. And these are all pretty high-IQ folks who are well read and presumably understand perfectly well the complexity of American history, culture, and politics.

I wonder what books I’d choose if I were limited to three?

The FBI email story continues to get even more ridiculous. Here is the LA Times:

Investigators came across the emails while investigating whether Weiner violated federal law when exchanging sexually explicit texts with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, one official said….The emails were not to or from Clinton, and contained information that appeared to be more of what agents had already uncovered, the official said, but in an abundance of caution, they felt they needed to further scrutinize them.

There is literally nothing here. We have a bunch of emails from Huma Abedin to other people. The FBI has not read them yet and has no idea what they’re about. At first glance—presumably from scanning the subject lines and names of recipients—they appear to be duplicates of stuff we’ve already seen. And it will likely take several weeks before we know anything more.

There. Is. Literally. Nothing. Here.

WTF was Jim Comey thinking when he wrote his suggestive but ambiguous letter about these emails to eight congressional Republicans—each of them practically slavering for Hillary Clinton’s scalp—11 days before an election? And all of it based on absolutely nothing—a fact that he very carefully avoided admitting. Has he gone completely around the bend?

Well, it turns out the “unrelated case” that led the FBI to more Hillary Clinton emails was an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting. Because of course it was. It is what we all deserve.

But it’s even stupider than that. In the past, I’ve found Pete Williams to be a pretty reliable guy, and here’s what he has to say:

.@PeteWilliamsNBC—In looking at Weiner’s laptop, investigators discovered Huma also used the laptop—which contained some Huma/Hillary emails pic.twitter.com/v1FKrYtrJD

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016

If Williams is correct, investigators looked at Weiner’s laptop and discovered that Weiner’s wife—Clinton aide and all-around conservative boogeyman Huma Abedin—had also used it. So there are some emails from Abedin to Hillary Clinton on the hard drive. Here’s Williams:

Now they’ve got to go get court process to get the right to…take a wider look at these emails and begin that process. You said earlier this probably won’t be wrapped up before Election Day? Scratch probably.

In other words, nobody has even looked at these emails yet. The FBI has to get a court order first. So: are these emails that have already been turned over? Maybe. Are they routine emails about schedules and so forth? Maybe. Nobody, including the FBI, has the slightest idea. But there’s certainly no reason to think there are any bombshells here.

Needless to say, that didn’t stop every news outlet in the country from blaring this at the tops of their front pages. They never learn, do they? Email stories hyped by folks like Jason Chaffetz never pan out. But news orgs get suckered every time anyway. So just to make sure their shame is preserved for posterity, here they are:

Please let it be over. Please please please. I can’t take any more of thi—

Ahem. Shall we do cat blogging a few minutes early? Yes we shall. Here is Hopper doing her very best impression of a concrete rabbit. Not bad!

For more on our furry feline companions, check out “Good Thing Cats Are Adorable, Because They Get Away With a Lot of Crap.” It’s an interview with cat enthusiast and science writer Abigail Tucker to discuss her new book, The Lion in the Living Room. The title sort of reminds me of this tweet.

I slept badly last night and feel kind of crappy this morning. I was hoping I could just stare at the ceiling for a while and then put up some catblogging and call it a week. But no. Email mania is back. Here’s the letter FBI Director Jim Comey sent to a rogue’s gallery of committee chairmen this morning regarding its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server:

In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as assess their importance to our investigation.

Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.

Translation: We have some emails we got from somewhere. That’s all I can tell you. NBC’s Pete Williams adds this:

NEW: NBC’s Pete Williams reports that the e-mails Comey announced today were NOT originally withheld by Clinton or campaign.

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) October 28, 2016

Pete Williams sources say in course of a separate investigation, FBI came across “a device.” found emails there. but emails NOT from HRC

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) October 28, 2016

Paul Krugman is PISSED:

Comey needs to provide full info immediately. Otherwise he has clearly made a partisan intervention, betraying his office.

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 28, 2016

Journalist Twitter is full of shock at FBI behavior here. That same shock should make it into news reports; not doing so misleads public

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 28, 2016

Donald Trump is CHUFFED:

“We must not let her take her criminal scheme to the Oval Office,” Trump said, adding, “I have great respect that the FBI and Department of Justice have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made. Perhaps finally, justice will be done.”

Wasn’t Trump saying just a few weeks ago that the FBI was hopelessly corrupt and couldn’t be trusted? I’m pretty sure he did.

Bottom line: There are some emails. They aren’t from Hillary Clinton. They weren’t withheld from the investigation. The case isn’t being “reopened.” That is all.

Speaking for myself, I’m willing to back any bet that anyone wants to make that this whole thing is a complete nothing. Republicans will be lathering away for the next 11 days, but there’s no there there.