Commercial TV made Trump a political star. He alone made himself a loser.

The postmortem on this election will be brutal. Almost none of the participants -- candidates, campaign managers, consultants, the political parties, the press in its many manifestations, even those mostly innocent pollsters -- will escape unscathed. They've all helped give our quadrennial ritual a massive black eye before a can't-believe-it's-happening world. Some more than others, it's…