In the past few months, Donald Trump has entered the consciousness of me – I am allergic to most politics – and many other people, everyone I know is speaking about him. So I wanted to write about how I am coming to terms with what I call Trumpism. Many people are concerned about it.

I was a political reporter for awhile, I wrote for the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other places, the politics I wrote about  then has no bearing much on the politics of today, my experience is of little relevance. I don’t think much of the old days. None of what I read about or see on the news would have been imaginable just a few short years ago.

I ought to say that I have no appetite for the left or the right thing. I don’t hate people who disagree with me, unless they do so hatefully. I don’t tell other people what to think, what to do, or who to vote for. I don’t argue my beliefs on Facebook or anywhere else, I am a sort of Henry David Thoreau type of recluse, I believe in minding my own business and living my own life and not thinking that just because I believe something, everyone else ought to.

This writing is my personal journey to try and understand what is happening around me, I’m sharing it so I can understand it, not so everybody else will agree or disagree.

I am not writing to endorse Trump or attack him, rather to share how I am coming to experience him, since he is now in my face and in my head and on my screens daily. He is clearly not going anywhere soon. I am always drawn to writing about what everyone else is thinking about.

I am not an analyst or political commentator. It is not your business to know who I am going to vote for, nor is it my business to know who you support. And truthfully, I don’t care. I know this makes me strange, but then, if you read the blog, you probably already know that. If you are angry about politics, and hate one side or the other, this is probably not the place for you to be.

Trump has shocked me with his vicious and continuing attacks on women, I find that offensive and also sad, because his hateful speech towards women and Muslims and anyone who disagrees with him is offensive by itself, but it also completely obscures the very powerful issues he has raised and revealed.

Writing these days, I see that I am channeling Wendell Berry and Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders) at the same time.  A strange mix. While Berry is a poet, farmer, author, environmentalist, and a gentleman,  Trump is none of those things. But they both approach the same important subject (for me)  from opposite ends of the political spectrum: “What are people for?”

Since World War II, and then most dramatically starting in the 1960’s, we have seen millions of good jobs leave the country and thousands of communities destroyed in exchange for the promise that our opening up to a global economy and linking to other parts of the world would benefit our entire economy and everyone in it.

It has not, of course, as both Berry and Trump (and Sanders) point out, the global economy has lowered some prices and greatly benefited a handful of people at the very top of the economic pile. It has left wounded and stranded vast numbers of working and middle-class Americans, who have not been aided or helped in any way to deal with the loss of their work, dignity, peace of mind and community. They promised trickle-down economics, but there hasn’t really even been a drip.

There was much talk of re-training and of so many new opportunities everyone would find new work. That didn’t happen either.

Enormous swathes of America have been devastated by the flight of jobs and businesses overseas, and as we now know, corporations and the wealthy have profited beyond imagination, almost everyone else has suffered. People feel misled, betrayed and abandoned. In other cultures, they would have taken to the streets long ago with sticks and torches. They may yet. I think it was hard for many of them to believe what was happening. The credibility of leaders has been profoundly damaged.

And now a presidential candidate comes along who seems as angry as they were, and who reflected and mirrored and spoke to their anger.

The big mistake, said one Stanford economist I read regularly, was not in signing trade agreements, but in not taking any responsibility for aiding the people damaged and displaced by them. Many were – are – older workers, not trained for the tech revolution and were simply discarded. They have been struggling ever since, they live in fear and have no reason to hope.

There was this feeling that it would all work itself out, but that turned out to be the way in which they white-washed the damage and brushed it under the rug.

That, wrote the economist, is the fault of both parties. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have grasped the scale of the suffering caused by the rush to the new global economy or done much about it. Everyone who lives in a town or city in rural or middle America sees it every day.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seem to have understood this and have made this central themes in their campaigns (Wendell Berry has  been writing about it for years). They both are doing much better than anyone predicted. In a sense, I would have expected a democratic socialist to fare even worse than a foul-mouthed and sexist billionaire.

That is how upset people are. Most, according to the polls,  are not, in fact, driven by ideology. They don’t care about the left or the right either (bless them for that), they are tired of getting screwed by rich people and politicians.

Hilary Clinton was a champion of many of these trade agreements, and her Republican opponents are still talking about tax cuts for the rich and cutting Social Security and Medicare. They don’t seem to have gotten it yet, even in this traumatic year. It might take a revolution.

No one, including me for sure, seems to have grasped the depth and anger and devastation this arrogance and indifference has caused – to farmers, industrial workers, small businesses, factories and countless cities and towns. We do seem to know about the wealth it has brought – to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and other cities who have been able to attract new kinds of businesses that need new kinds of information workers, not factory workers. Our media does much better fawning over the rich than talking to the poor.

There is no greater formula for political upheaval in all of human history than when great masses of people to suffer while their rich Lords and Masters and political leaders get obscenely rich right in front of them, all the while making feckless promises they can’t keep.  The mean income of members of congress is over a million dollars a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Billionaires have been given the keys to the kingdom by the corrupt and greedy high priests of the Temple.

This is all so strange,  Karl Marx’s wet dream about capitalism’s self-destructiveness slowly coming true. Jesus would have been lighting torches, calling on his disciples to pick up their swords and head for the Capitol.

For me, the real issue isn’t whether or not Donald Trump is a pig – oink, oink – but who will try to solve the issues he has raised and the candidacy he has despoiled by soiling himself almost daily. He is pulling the plug on a lot of rage and seems not to care where it goes.

The Republicans have their set of beloved issues, the Democrats have theirs. I can’t say I’m wild about either the left or the right, people who put labels  on their head might as well label them “I am lazy and dumb.”

Nobody was talking about the issues of the once comfortable and relatively prosperous middle and working class, even as it steadily disintegrated. People are talking about it now. It.

I’ve always loved Wendell Berry and I do not love Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has got to be kidding, loveable as he is (single payer health care for everyone and tuition too?).

But I will give the devil his due.

Trump shamed and exposed the professional consultants and the elite politicians and the media all at the same time, all were lazy, greedy, unknowing and asleep.

It is not in the least surprising that large numbers of people are furious and also desperate for a radical change that will address their very legitimate fears and troubles, as political leaders are supposed to do but have not done. They are in a panic to find anyone – anyone – who might actually change things for them.

This does not make me want to vote for Donald Trump. His offensive and divisive behavior is not, I think, something I will ever be able to get past.  He is, to me, utterly unfit for so complex a job as heading a big and complicated nation. I think if I voted for him, I would be pissing on the very idea of the country I love.

For me, our national soul is a generous and decent one. I believe that will reveal itself.

If I voted for someone who says the things he says about Muslims and women and the wives of his opponents then I could not look myself in the mirror every day. I understand that some people feel differently, and they will have to look in their own mirrors and make their own decisions.

The people supporting Donald Trump and shouting at his rallies are launching their own kind of revolution, and it seems inevitable and also shocking that he was the first one to really see it. I haven’t figured that out, how a golf-obsessed and ostentatiously vulgar billionaire could see what almost everyone else missed.

For years, I’ve seen Donald Trump in the same vein as I’ve always viewed Hugh Hefner, a strange American celebrity curiosity that no one could possibly take seriously. I could follow their antics and posturing from time to time, but I never ever really thought about them. I never had to think about them.

So I was quite wrong about that, and today, everyone is taking Donald Trump seriously, he is the talk of the nation.

He is driving the truck. He understands media in a way very few politicians ever will.

I don’t care to spend the year ranting about him and wringing my hands, I do care to try and understand what is happening. I think I’m beginning to grasp it, my search have brought me into contact with a number of supporters of Donald Trump whose lives have just been shattered by fear and change.

And my readings of H.L. Mencken have also helped me. This is not new, he said, from time to time savvy populist bubbleheads – he called them Boobus Americanus – rise up to speak to rage and fear and people and they invariably blow themselves up, since they have no idea what to do beyond spawning hysteria and pitching to hate.

I think I see history repeating itself, this particular strain in the American psyche. Mencken wrote about it for years.

So that’s as far as I’ve gotten. If I were sitting and having a cup of coffee with Mr. Trump, I would probably tell him what I imagine many other people are telling him: you have some important things to say, and many people are listening to them. Why did you crap it all up with so much hateful and repulsive garbage?

Then the answer hit me, of course, it is really quite obvious. Trump obviously saw himself in much the same way I saw him, as a famous oddity nobody needed to take seriously. I’m fairly sure he is as shocked about it as I am, as most of are. Now, he is scrambling to be taken seriously, he is pounding his fists on the table and demanding it, threatening us with riots if we don’t go along.

I don’t think it works that way. Now, it’s probably too late for him. Most people don’t want to ever take him seriously. There is something very reassuring about that. And also something sad.

So there. When I write something I learn how I feel about it, I come to terms with that. Many of my friends and former friends have never understood that. But it always works for me.