The news world is all aflutter:  Donald Trump was heard on tape saying vile and disgusting things about women! Ratings galore!  Pundits never-ending!

The left is all excited:  this is it! This will be the thing that FINALLY (finally!) convinces people that this vulgarian isn’t our next president.

But me?  Not so much.  I’m pretty sure the only one who will be hurt by the decade old tape is hapless Billy Bush, heard giggling as the Donald heaped vulgarity on top of vulgarity, gleefully cheering him on. He’ll be out of a job soon enough. But really, who cares about him? Just another embarrassing Bush.  Poor Barbara.

Every reason you have for thinking he’s done with is wrong.  Because from the beginning, this  presidential election has been anything but.  Logic, reason, and decency have no place in his campaign. For every argument you have for why he’s done, I have a sad, sad answer:

His Supporters will Leave him.  This is too much!

No they won’t! Let’s face it, Trump’s litany of lies, racist comments, and sexist jibes has helped his candidacy with his base thus far. What many of us see as vulgar and disqualifying, they see as relatable, and “telling it like it is.”  They’re not going anywhere.

In any other year, any one of the comments Donald Trump has made would have ended his candidacy.  From his – more than once! – implying that he’d like to date his daughter (ew!), to his demeaning a revered Senator and War Hero, to his disrespect for a Gold Star family, his racist comments, his misogynistic ones.  Sure, some people leave him every time.  Everyone has a limit.  But there are so many vile statements, and we’ve heard them so many times, that we’ve become numb to them.  We don’t even hear them anymore.

Or worse, his supporters hear him loud and clear — and that’s why they love him.

What about the undecided?  This will make them decide!

Some may finally decide he’s not getting their vote.  But for the most part, I don’t think they’re going anywhere either.  Because – and prepare to be shocked- most people just don’t care if, in the privacy of the proverbial locker room, men speak about women in derogatory terms.  All you have to do is look at the endless, relentless misogyny directed at Hilary Clinton over her decades in public service, and you’ll know that respect for women is low on the priority totem pole of most Americans.

Donald Trump treats women like crap.  He gropes them.  He talks about them in the basest of terms.

Yawn.

The evangelicals,though.  He’s sure to lose them, right?

Nope. Lots of evangelicals and other less dogmatic religious voters are one-issue types, and that issue is abortion.  Trump, though historically supportive of a woman’s right to choose, now is vehemently against abortion. And his chosen running mate signed one of the most extreme anti-abortion laws in the country  (it was later overturned). He wanted women to pay for funerals for their unborn fetuses!  Seriously?  And while Trump is not anti-gay — notably, it’s one of the few groups he seems not to have offended –  Pence makes up for that lack big time.  As governor, he opposed a law that would have banned discrimination against the LGBTQ community on the grounds that it wasn’t discrimination at all, but a reflection of “God’s idea.”

Pence claims to be — repeatedly – a “Christian, a conservative, and a Republican” in that order.  Given that, in a perfect world,  his Christian response to Trump’s decidedly un-Christian language in his latest sewage spill of language  would be for Pence to leave the ticket.  On principle.

Ok.  You can stop laughing now.

The Media will make it so.

They wish. The Media spent the first part of this election cycle making Donald Trump’s candidacy possible through their elitist refusal to take him seriously, and their avarice – the man brings ratings and cash to news venues.  Now, they’re suddenly all having a crisis of conscience — or maybe they’re really, really scared – and are furiously trying to take him down.  It hasn’t happened yet.

Donald Trump will weather this storm like he has all the others.  Kelly Anne Conway – that she-devil genius who will one day, if the universe has one teeny ounce of fairness in it – pay for her sins of spins, will find a way to smilingly deflect, deflect, deflect.  And The Donald will march into November, despicable as always, while his supporters whine about emails, all the way to the ballot box.

Don’t be fooled: this latest storm of outrage, this tsunami of excitement that the end is nigh will drift out to sea like all the rest.

Worse, there is no end, in sight or otherwise. Because even when The Donald loses the election – and he will lose –  we lose too.    The Pandora’s box of racism and xenophobia will not be closed so easily.  The damage done to our National reputation around the globe will not be fixed by one loss on election day.

And poor Billy Bush won’t be the only one paying the price.