Let's pause to marvel at Donald Trump's unbelievable rise

Let us take a moment to marvel at Donald Trump's wild, improbable ride to the Republican presidential nomination. It began, as he will remind you, with an escalator ride in Trump Tower, and became inevitable with his victory in the Indiana primary on Tuesday night and the subsequent withdrawal from the race of Sen. Ted Cruz. Along the way, Trump insulted just about everybody but his own family members, belittled and knocked out 15 of his 16 rivals (John Kasich is technically still running), and defied all predictions but his own.

Wednesday is essentially the start of the 2016 presidential election. It's going to get very ugly very fast, if the Trump and Clinton campaigns are to be believed. So before Trump begins the effort to "make every voter in America think of 'Crooked Hillary' as they go to the ballot box," as Citizens United head and sometime Trump adviser David Bossie says, and before he walks "into a $1 billion buzz saw" from the Clinton camp, as Trump critic and GOP strategist Stuart Stevens put it, let's look back at how amazing Trump's rise to the top has been.

Any appreciation of Trump's wild ride has to start with his competition. "Beginning as a punchline — and an asterisk in polling — Trump beat the most crowded (and one of the deepest and most accomplished) Republican fields in modern presidential history," Chris Cillizza notes in The Washington Post. This was the GOP's A-Team, from seasoned pros (Jeb! Bush) to fresh and inspiring (and Latino) faces (Marco Rubio), from moderates (Lindsey Graham) to staunch conservatives (Scott Walker, Rick Perry) to iconoclasts (Rand Paul). CNN's Robert Yoon commemorates the GOP fallen with Post-It notes:

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Stephen Colbert had his higher-budget, more absurdist "Hungry for Power Games" sendoffs, based on a popular dystopian young adult book and movie franchise:

But any way you look at it, Trump jumped, uninvited, into a field filled with senators and governors with decades of combined experience in government, backed by cash-flush super PACs, and he beat them all, using relatively little of his own fortune to do so. Everybody likes a good show, and he is running the most entertaining one of 2016. Trump's victory "is, simply put, the single most amazing thing I have seen in my 18 years of covering politics," Cillizza says.

Republican leaders did not (and probably still don't) like or trust Trump, and many conservative pundits hated (and still hate) him. But he made himself invulnerable by becoming invaluable — his decision to skip that one Fox News debate may have been petulant, but he made his point: Fox News had its lowest-rated debate, in a season of Trump-fueled blockbusters.

And even though Trump's ultimate victory in the GOP race probably shouldn't come as a surprise — he has led every GOP poll since July 19, save a three-day mini-surge by Ben Carson — it is still slightly baffling and disorienting.

Trump is full of contradictions. He's a billionaire, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who shakes his fists about how the system is "rigged." He's a businessman who vilifies China for sucking up American jobs while he makes men's fashion accessories in the country. What policies he's outlined are full of conflicting ideas and magical results achievable only by Trump's winning leadership. He seems to hold little regard for facts, and doesn't seem all that excited by policy.

He gets away with saying things that would probably kill the career of a lesser politician — or maybe a better politician. Trump hasn't been held accountable for what he says, because he doesn't seem to care what the political media thinks, and the media has long considered him a lightweight and an entertainer.

Trump has shown the value of being a good showman, but he wasn't just dishing up bread and circuses for the masses. He seems more interested in what voters say they want than Republican Party orthodoxies. That's pretty smart. Supporters say they like him for the same reason the political establishment doesn't: He isn't politically correct, and he seems as angry and annoyed at the political elite as they are. "Many of us may be disappointed that the right guy at the right time just happens to not be a conservative," conservative commentator S.E. Cupp writes at CNN, "but there's no denying that the base finally found their candidate."

So, let us now praise Donald Trump. He promised he would keep on winning, and he has. He did it his way. Republican lawmakers who said horrible things about Trump are now saying they will probably support him — we'll see if anti-Trump conservative pundits fall in line, too.

The next six months will be full of vitriol and drama, and if you already know who you are going to vote for, you can probably tune out. But you probably won't, because America is about to embark on the greatest, highest-stakes reality TV show yet, and for better or worse, you can thank (or blame) Donald Trump. Seriously.