Ridicule should remain an important part of Harris’s playbook as Trump’s campaign continues to spew execrable lies

While presidential campaigns always distort and distend time in strange ways, this election already feels like it’s stretched on surreally for eons – long enough that several distinct and quite different feeling periods have been pressed into the fossil record.

Recall for instance, if you can, the Republican primary. For many months, Republican insiders who should have known better and were paid handsomely to know better pushed the idea that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, or even one of his lesser-known and lesser-resourced rivals, stood a real chance of defeating Donald Trump for the nomination – even as the former president remained firmly at the top of the polls and his challengers struggled to articulate a rationale for their campaigns to a still staunchly pro-Trump base. There were never any real grounds for this, but the press mocked up a race for DeSantis and his fellow also-rans anyway, complete with the most irrelevant series of debates in the history of American presidential politics.

Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist