COMMENT | Ask anyone over teh tarik what they think of politics these days and watch the face they make first. Not anger. Not passion. Just a tired little exhale, the kind you give when someone brings up a topic you’ve already given up on.

That exhale is the real story of this election season. Not the manifestos, not the coalition maths, not the speeches. The exhale, because the question hanging over all of it is not who governs. It’s whether we believe a single word any of them say anymore.

You can date the rot fairly precisely. February 2020. The Sheraton Move.

Before that, Malaysians could still kid themselves that the ballot meant something, that the government you voted for was roughly the government you got.

Then a few dozen men sat in a hotel and rearranged the country between dinner and dessert, and the whole illusion came apart in a weekend. The frog-hopping after that just rubbed it in.

We learned, all of us, that...