The Alicia Machado Election

Monday night Mrs. Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who Trump was mean to, and bragged that she is now a U.S. citizen and will be a Clinton voter. Apparently, Miss Machado has lived a fairly wild and sordid life since her dealings with Trump twenty years ago. Not really the sort of person that candidates of the past would have pointed out by name before a national audience as supporters of theirs. But it’s not the past. It’s now, and as Mr. Trump asked, “Where did you find this?” Part of the answer is that Trump has contributed a lot over the decades, and more each decade than the one before, to creating our Kardashian era in which people like Miss Machado are easy to find. Unpleasantly hard to avoid, really.

So here we are with one candidate who thinks it’s a nifty thing that a woman who posed naked in magazines, served as the getaway driver for her homicidal boyfriend, and threatened to kill a judge has been given citizenship and a vote—because she finds some small advantage in this. The other candidate is married to a woman who posed naked for magazines, thinks that is normal, and has performed an oversized labor toward normalizing public depravity.