EUGENE VOLOKH: Sad Thoughts About American Politics. “One way of thinking about this is to imagine this happening in a foreign country. Imagine that, unexpectedly, we Americans started to pay attention to an election campaign in some other nation. In that campaign, an 81-year-old incumbent who was obviously entering cognitive decline was squaring an off against a 78-year-old candidate who had been convicted of crimes, was being tried for other crimes, and who at the very least behaved highly un-Presidentially in response to a prior electoral defeat. Would we think that the foreign country had healthy political institutions?”