Hillary Clinton based her empty campaign on the idea that Donald Trump was a brewing nightmare. She forgot to infuse her own candidacy with any guiding message. The Wall Street Journal quotes Damon Linker’s summation of the Clinton campaign thesis:

Donald Trump as an opponent! What a dream! Clinton didn’t even need to campaign in August. She could just rest up and travel to a few fundraisers where she could rake in $143 million in excess cash. The media buy would take care of Trump. Hell, she wouldn’t even need a motivating message of her own. Just being Not Trump and reminding voters over and over and over about his self-evident awfulness would be more than enough to win—and not just in the usual states behind the fabled Blue Wall. No siree, she could clean up in other places, too. Arizona. Georgia. Maybe even Texas! Wouldn’t that be something? . . .

I even believed it for a while, writing the most boneheaded column of my career as a writer, on how Trump would lose in a historic landslide.

Read more from Linker here.