Hours before Tuesday’s debate, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that, were the CBO not scrupulously nonpolitical, would have seemed impertinent. It presented, in the bland language of a weather report, data that the debate moderators evidently considered too trivial to mention, a gross misjudgment for which both candidates probably were grateful.

Without saying so, the CBO report implicitly forecast stormy political weather. It said that in August the government added $381 billion to the nation’s debt, and that by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, the one-year deficit will exceed $2 trillion. Predictable developments (debt service, which already exceeds defense spending, precluding proper defense and other spending) and divisive choices (about pruning the entitlement state and addressing national security needs) within a decade will convulse U.S. politics.

But through the rhetorical fog, one could glimpse a tantalizing possibility, a precondition for coping with the coming turbulence. The restoration of normal politics will require two things: The removal of Donald Trump — that Krakatau of volcanic, incoherent, fact-free bombast — from public life. And the rekindling of an irrepressible conflict.

It is between progressivism, of which Kamala Harris is full to overflowing, and actual conservatism, about which Trump is contemptuous. As he ages, he mimics progressivism’s politics of throwing government’s weight around.

In the debate, Harris achieved three things. First, to the substantial portion of the television audience who knew next to nothing about her, and nothing at all about her proclivity for rhetorical gaseousness, she resembled a plausible president — more so than the former president. Second, she befuddled him into repetitious digressions about his abhorrence of immigrants — and his admiration of foreign strongmen who are in awe of his strength. Third, she imparted fresh momentum to her somewhat flagging “golly, this is fun” one-note campaign.

This election pits someone whose current persona is obviously synthetic against someone whose dishonesty in the service of his egotism is scarily authentic. Now, however, traditional conservatives can envision the least unpalatable November outcome. They have an unenthralled understanding of government’s proper scope and actual competence. So, their preferred outcome would be the election of Harris, and of a Republican Senate to regularly remind her that most Americans disagree with most of what she believes.

Disbelieve almost everything she has said for weeks in disavowing almost everything she said for years while reciting progressivism’s catechism. She seems to have no more agency than does an iron filing drawn to a magnet. The pull of her party’s progressive base, whose Bay Area faction incubated her political persona, means that she would be a progressive president.

Or as much of one as the Supreme Court (progressives since Woodrow Wilson have disrespected the separation of powers) and a Republican Senate would permit. Then, in 2028, Republicans could offer a choice, not a Trumpian echo of progressives’ executive highhandedness, fiscal profligacy and economic intrusiveness: his industrial policy (protectionism) against theirs.

If in 2028 Democrats have held the presidency for eight years, and for four years Republicans have stopped inhaling Trump’s fumes, the momentous contest for the Republicans’ 2028 nomination will decide: Will meaningful two-party politics be restored by the revival of traditional conservatism?

The good news about bad presidencies is that Americans’ unhealthy expectations for presidents — as visionaries, prophets, economic savants, society’s healers and political pastors — might collapse under the weight of childish hopes. A nation that entrusts the presidency to Harris after consigning it to Trump and then Joe Biden might lower its expectations for that office, making them commensurate with the capacities of recent occupants.

Americans who say they hate politics actually hunger for it — for the normal give-and-take of bargaining. They are embarrassed by Trump’s infantile comportment, and especially his insistence that the America they love is a “failing nation.”

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.