After Donald Trump sealed the deal in the Indiana primary Tuesday (as the Valley News headline artfully put it the following morning), he boasted that the doubters, detractors and dissenters were getting on board at last. “They are calling now,” said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “And they are calling to say, ‘We’d love to get on the train.’ The Trump train. We have a lot of people coming.”

Interesting if true, since the odds are that Trump’s long strange trip to a dark place will end in a train wreck for the Republican Party. But we have no doubt that at least some GOP leaders are sufficiently craven to go along for the ride. Take, for example, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, whose campaign spokeswoman, when asked, replied that, “Kelly plans to support the nominee. As a candidate herself, she hasn’t and isn’t planning to endorse anyone this cycle.” This has the ring of someone who hopes to be acquitted on a technicality once the crime has been committed. The jury of New Hampshire voters will deliver their verdict on her re-election bid this November.

One has to wonder, though, whether the odds on Trump winning the presidency are any longer than they were on his locking up the Republican nomination. To put this remarkable feat in context, consider that if things unfold as it now appears, Trump will become the first major party nominee who has never served in elective office since Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the latter earned his stripes as the commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II, not in real estate development or as a TV celebrity. Moreover, Trump didn’t register as a Republican until 2012 and his ever-shifting “positions” are antithetical to party orthodoxy in many respects. 

So despite current polling results that show Trump trailing Hillary Clinton nationally by about 10 percentage points, it’s not a given that he will self-destruct before November. A lot of conservative opinion leaders were convinced that Republican voters would come to their senses long before the nomination was decided. They didn’t. Now Trump is just one good or bad day away from putting his brand on the White House.

If nothing else, Trump has displayed a remarkable gift for identifying and exploiting his opponent’s weaknesses, of which Clinton has many, beginning with the fact that she is a lackluster campaigner to whom large numbers of voters give low marks for trustworthiness and honesty. We have no doubt that Trump will revel in rummaging through the baggage she carries in an effort to make the campaign uncomfortably (for her) personal.

By contrast with her unqualified and unprepared prospective opponent, Clinton is undoubtedly the best-prepared candidate for the presidency in a long time, and perhaps ever. She has understandably made a point of her extensive experience in office during the Democratic primary campaign against Bernie Sanders, but experience may not be what restive voters are yearning for this year. And as Sanders has pointed out, having experience and having good judgment can be two very different things.

Assuming that she is the Democratic nominee, what Clinton needs to do is articulate a reason for electing her that does not depend on her resume, or a laundry list of positions on various issues. The “vision thing,” as George H.W. Bush memorably disparaged it, cannot be discounted as a factor in motivating voters, and so far Clinton has not really embraced it. Many a sports team has come to grief by trying to run out the clock while sitting on a big lead. The same could happen to Clinton. Her best course is to make the race about something larger than her and Trump.