By Chris Cillizza October 10 at 9:50 AM

I've talked to Stuart Stevens, the lead strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, from time to time during this amazing and amazingly unpredictable 2016 campaign. As Donald Trump's campaign was scrambling amid the release of a hot mic tape detailing a number of sexually suggestive comments about women, I reached out to Stuart to talk about the state of the race and the state of his party. Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited, is below.

FIX: When we talked in August, you compared Trump and his campaign to a speeding car with its parts falling off. Was the last 72 hours inevitable in your mind? Was this always how Trump’s campaign ended?

Stevens: Well, we still don't know how Trump campaign ends. (I hope he will withdraw.) But the reality is that Donald Trump has always been a ridiculous candidate for president who seemed to have no interest in becoming a serious candidate for president.

The Trump campaign reminds me of the narrative of 'The Big Short," the great Michael Lewis chronicle of the sub-prime mortgage collapse. The fundamentals of the housing market were terribly weak, just as the fundamentals of Trump's candidacy have always been terribly weak. But even those who saw the truth of the sub-prime market and made huge bets on its collapse had difficulty timing the collapse. It took longer than they expected. I feel the same about the Trump candidacy. It surprises me it took this long to collapse but that it would collapse seemed overwhelmingly likely. It's like the scene in "The Sun Also Rises" when a character is asked how he went bankrupt. "Two ways. Gradually then suddenly." So it would seem with Trump campaign.

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