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“The greatest glory in living lies not in falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Nelson Mandela.

Listening to as much of the impeachment “debate” as I could bear, my mind kept going back to Mark Twain’s very famous statement that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

It took years of lying to get us into this mess; it will take at least much work and time to get us out. Time to get to work.

Trump and his followers are the lies that keep on giving. They are indefatigable, nourished by nothing but more lies.

Every time we begin to take a deep breath and celebrate the idea that he is gone, he popes up again like some electrolyzed zombie who cannot be killed.

He may have been brought to life in Frankenstein’s Laboratory; lightning did that to his hair. There is much power in having no shame.

If the sun kills vampires, then the truth will eventually kill Trump and his cult.  If you know your history, you know that truth always wins in the end; it’s just that the end sometimes makes its own time.

Listening to the debate was discouraging, draining; we seemed to rush back a few weeks in time, skipping over the insurrection at the capitol last week and rushing past the few minutes when we seemed we might be uniting.

There is no debate in this debate, only fury.

Twain was right, and his ironic comment is worth dwelling on. We live in the great Crossroads of Truth And Lies, the United States of America. It can bend the mind.

America’s most creative and exciting challenge is to start whacking the lies down. It can be done. It has been done.

Lies take seconds to make and even less time to race across the Internet, our new Super Highway Of Hatred And Insurrection.

China has figured out to handle this new highway; they ban any opinion they don’t like or rebellious comment, jailing and shooting whoever they need to jail and shoot.

Even in the era of Trump, America isn’t quite ready for that solution, but there will be a lot of talk this coming year about what the Internet is doing to our society and what can be done about it.

Like maybe making it a federal crime to threaten to kill people online.

On the House of Representatives’ floor, the lies had a good day, often spoken more loudly and angrily than the truth.

Nobody protested BLM marches. Antifa, not white nationalists, caused the violence. The Republican Party wants to unify the country. Nancy Pelosi is a communist, just like Joe Biden, who is also a socialist. The rioters were just kids who got carried away. Trump never incited violence; he just got a bit too excited.

Psychologists tell us that everybody lies, even though we know it’s wrong. But the problem with lying, say psychiatric studies, is that the more you lie, the easier it gets, and the more likely you are to do it again.

Donald Trump’s power lies with his ease and skill at lying, from Stormy Daniels to the Presidential Election.

People who know Trump well say that lying has become such an ingrained habit that he no longer can tell the difference between truth and lies.

That makes him a sociopath and a dangerous one.

His is a culture of lying, almost a Satanic religion.

He supported, promoted, inspired a new generation of righteous f liars, many of whom he pushed, cajoled, and campaigned to get into congress and public office. The crueler and uglier he is to people, the more his followers love him.

But it also traps him.

Every time he tries to act like a normal President, his follower’s rage and scream.  They didn’t elect a normal President.

The less he acts like a normal President, the more isolated and powerless he becomes. This is the hole he dug for himself and jumped into at every opportunity.

Six months ago, he had it made. A week ago, he finally managed to blow it all up.

Many of his congressional conspirators gave speeches today that were bristling with lies. Trump and his peeps tell so many lies that it’s almost impossible to keep up with them, let alone persuade people of the truth.

If lying takes an instant, correcting a lie takes a lot longer – the studies all say that. For most people, lying gets limited as we develop a sense of morality and the ability to self-regulate.

For Trump’s world, the lies grow and deepen. Trumpism is built on lies; lies are now firmly ingrained in millions of Americans’ neural systems. They have become their truth.

We tend to associate lying with bad people, but according to Scientific-American, lying is among the most sophisticated and demanding accomplishments of the human brain. Donald Trump might be a very stable genius, after all.

Electronic stimulation of the prefrontal cortex appears to improve our ability to deceive. This region of the brain may, among other things, be responsible for a decision to lie or tell the truth.

Trump’s prefrontal cortex must be the side of a basketball; perhaps that’s what that nest on the top of his head is hiding. (The prefrontal cortex below is in yellow.) You can tell a Trump follower by his forehead’s size: think Stephen Miller).

Psychology Today has reported at length about the difficulty of challenging a lie and getting people to accept the truth. Argument and denial don’t work.

How do we discredit lies without repeating them and spreading them further? The answer, says the magazine, is simple. When reporting or commenting on false statements, always lead with the truth.

University of California Berkeley Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff is one of the most prominent figures to promote this idea of deprogramming lies. He suggests that when discussing or commenting on one of Trump’s lies or those of his followers, we should always talk about the truth first.

Then we should briefly note the lie before going back to the truth.

He refers to this idea as a Truth Sandwich.

Instead of directly repeating a false claim, consider this structure instead: “The facts are X, but some have falsely claimed Y. Let’s focus on X.” This is a simple solution that friends, family members,  journalists, social media managers, fact-checking websites, and individuals can use to make sure that we spread truth, not lies.

When reporting lies, the facts should always come first. This way, our minds will stop confusing “alternative facts” with real ones.

Research, he says, suggests that we remember beginnings and endings far better than the middles of things, so calling out a lie while making sure we put the lie in the middle, where we will at least remember it, may help us ensure that the things that feel true to us actually are.

We are learning over time that Trumpism is, for many people, a cult, and cult followers are notoriously, even suicidally loyal to their cult leaders. They can’t be argued into the truth, at least not while the boss is around.

Challenges to cult followers must be patient, indirect, and repetitious.  Most people who have been lied to figure it out for themselves once separated from the source of the lying. It takes months, even years, to deprogram a lie.

They need some time and space.

It takes time and thought to undo a lie that people have been hearing and believing for days, weeks, even months.

Trump has almost hypnotic skills when he lies. Based on nothing but his repeated claims, almost half of the country believes he is telling the truth about the November election. Therefore, everyone else must be lying.

One of the most intriguing things about the attack on the capitol was the dream world many rioters were living in – conspiracy theories, Trump lies, social media rumors, and rage.

Hardly any of them knew the truth or had even heard it. This is a societal problem; no one is protecting them from perhaps the biggest scam in modern history – that Trump tells the truth about anything.

If sleazebags were stealing from their bank or retirement accounts, that would be a crime. Stealing someone’s honor and reality is considered the natural consequence of free speech.

Donald Trump just stole $300 million from his followers, with provably false claims.  Why does this sound like fraud to me?

This isn’t free in any way.

It appears to be time to get to work on lie-breaking.

The way to get started, said no less a Musketeer than Walt Disney, is to quit talking and begin doing.

Everyone who professes to cares about democracy, truth, and compassion has some work to do. Whining on Facebook only goes so far.

The bad news is that the lies have had so much time to live. The good news is that truth really is on our side. Truth corrodes lies; it has moral power behind it.

The impeachment debate reminds us – a good thing – that it will take time to unravel these lies and point Trump’s disappointed and manipulated followers in a different direction.

We have to stop thinking that all of this is over and then crashing when we see it isn’t.

It isn’t the end, but it might be the beginning of the end. Think of all those troops sleeping on the floors of government buildings in Washington.

Since self-interest brought his followers to Trump, self-interest will bring them back. “My son really isn’t interested in going to war,” said the mother of one of the rioters. “If he had a good job, he wouldn’t be making an ass out of himself in Washington.”

A start might be for the government to actually help these people, rather than ignore them or vilify them. Maybe it’s time to tell people the truth and work for the people, not just the lobbyists.

Whether people need every dollar or not, stimulus checks would help. So would the end of the coronavirus and enough vaccines for everyone to take and quickly.

So would those clean energy, high-paying jobs politicians have been talking about for years but are not showing up in Appalachia or the Industrial Midwest. So would some help with student debt.

That would help those collapsing hospitals and some health care for rural communities.

Politics is practical; it’s not really a noble or spiritual art.

Trump understood the transactional nature of politics. You do for them; they do for you.

He also understood that it didn’t really matter what you did; it mattered what you said you had done or would do.

No one had ever tried that before.

Trump’s biggest lie was in promising to do things for the people who love him so much. He lied. That is a huge hole for Joe Biden to walk into.

If the government is stunned by the politics of now into doing what it is supposed to do – helping people in tangible ways – those lying and cowardly crackpot congresspeople and toadies will be left sputtering and forgotten.

A massive infrastructure program would put many of those fuming working-class Trump voters to work.

As awful as it was, the insurrection further escalated the awakening process of many Americans and their institutions.

If I were voting, I’d say one of the most significant events of the week was the PGA’s decision – the most esteemed golfing organization in America – to pull its tournament out of Trump Bedminister.

When he loses them, he loses a big chunk of his soul and persona.

It is said that this was the worst punch in the gut for the President. His brand is poison.

We learned this year that a lot of people are threatening our democracy. We’ve also learned that even more people – many more people, from judges to CEO’s and aroused journalists – will fight for it. There is no turning back, only moving forward.

This is not the same country that Donald Trump was elected to lead in 2016. It is not even the same country that it was on June 5. Against all reason and odds, he brought democracy back to life and woke up a slumbering nation.

It will take a long time – years perhaps – before these lies will fade and unravel, and the political people who embraced them are slowly and relentlessly – and ruthlessly – replaced.

This process has begun. Senators Hawley and Cruz are ruined politically; their careers are grievously damaged. Trump himself is battered and bleeding.

The military has made it crystal clear that they are not into staging or supporting coups. All of those conservative judges really do love the constitution and will stand up for it.

And journalism still matters, now more than ever.

Finally, they proved their worth.

Black Americans now have one of the most powerful social organizations in American history – Black Lives Matter – to stand up for them. Stacey Abrams has proven that the impossible is possible. Integrity and a lot of footwork can change our world and has.

The immigrants and refugees will soon return to America.

And then there is the new President.

I like what I see of Joe Biden; I’m surprised and impressed. He isn’t the most exciting leader globally, but he is calm, steady, and focused on what the politicians call the People’s Business.

He’s stayed off the Trump Crazy Train and away from the partisan blood-letting.

If he sticks to that, contains the pandemic, mails out some more checks, and keeps the economy flowing, then the Truth Sandwich and changing times can begin to do their work.

I tried the sandwich last week. It worked on two different people. I believe in truth. It works.

 

It is common for mass media to favor one candidate or another or be a candidate’s favorite outlet.

It is unprecedented for a President and a presidential candidate to use media as their primary governing and campaigning resource.

Trump is our first President Of Media; he is a creation and a creature of media. Without it, he would not be President or have any chance at all of winning re-election.

For most of his life, say his biographers, he has been trying to manipulate the media. In Washington, he made his Hellish  Bargain. He’s figured it out.

Joe Biden has benefited from media exposure, but Donald Trump is almost nothing without it. He uses media to distract, lie, and feed his supporters, starving for outrage and grievance.

In a different time, Biden would be toast.  Donald Trump has become so vile and hateful he makes his opponent look like a saint.

Our modern media is only too happy to oblige our newest and most successful demagogue; they all smile all the way to the bank.

This is a time of great insincerity.

Almost nobody in public life actually believes what they say, and those that do – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the women of Black Lives Matter come to mind – are driven to our culture’s margins and harassed mercilessly.

Nobody in our country seems to want to live in a country with good health care, no gun violence, free child care, a longer life span, free vacations, and job security.

How can any citizen be blamed for mistrusting this system and wanting it to change? I feel for these poor people. They have created a true civic monster, he is their problem, not their solution. One way or another, they will soon learn this hard lesson.

I hope they remember how the media helped to betray them once more.

In terms of governing – I honestly don’t say this as a partisan, but as someone looking at the campaign from a distance – Trump has been the most disastrous and incompetent president in American history.

He hates democratic governance, rejects compromise or negotiation, fellates dictators, considers political opponents and critics as enemies, messed up our trade agreements, failed to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and regularly pollutes the very idea of independent governance.

He has failed to respond effectively to a single one the major issues of our time – climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, economic balance and equality, a historic deficit, racial conflict, police brutality, and systemic racism.

And I almost forget – illegals immigrants are crawling under, over, and around his little wall.

He breaks the law again and again by abusing his powers for personal gain.

Does anybody but Trump’s discredited army of Evangelicals care that Bahrain has recognized Israel? I’m Jewish, and I couldn’t care less. It has nothing to do with me.

But then, I’m not an Evangelic Christian who has lost his way and turned to blasphemy, greed, and hatred to soak up some political power.

Trump’s storied economy was focused overwhelmingly on the already wealthy, and his war in immigrants and refugees is a national stain we may never live down.

He has made us the object of ridicule worldwide, damaged the hardest fought international alliances, made us the only country on the earth to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,   subjected refugees to cruelty and suffering, insulted soldiers and veterans, and generals.

What a novel record of accomplishment. Lots of people can’t wait for him to do it again.

The list is even longer, but enough is enough.

Trump benefits from a Perfect Storm of media changes and evolutions.  It was a marriage from Hell, a hideous marriage of greed and power.

The Internet has shattered the journalistic structure seen for years as an unofficial fourth branch of government.  U.S. Newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

In 2008, there were 114,000 newsroom employees; by 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.

The Internet and digital and cable media has become the primary source of news for most Americans today, a hole big enough for a shameless demagogue to walk right through and into history.

Over 65 million Americans live in counties with only one local newspaper – or none at all.

When I worked as a producer for CBS News in the early 1980’s, there were nearly 2,000 employees, and there were more than 400 fact-checkers.  My boss told me the only thing that could get me fired was putting a lie on the air and failing to spend whatever was needed to be best.

Today, there are about 400 employees altogether. They don’t get to travel much.

News programs were deliberately not rated so that producer wouldn’t feel pressure to air inaccurate or sensationalized stories.

Most media was not considered to be “left” or “right” or to speak only to liberals and conservative.  We tried to speak to everybody. That was considered unethical.

Today, it is the standard.

When media was corporatized in the late ’80s and ’90s, all programs were rated so advertisers could be charged more, and cable news channels began looking for profitable niches rather than accurate and important stories.

Thus the rise of Fox News and MSNBC and even CNN. These outlets make a lot of money off Trump but have few reporters out in the country talking to ordinary people.

Polling was much cheaper, and that became the funnel through which information is channeled to the public—what a shame. The old pundits did a much better job.

Trump’s Presidency is actually a co-production of him and Fox News and several conservative websites.

Like the country, media has branched off into a left and right. Two ways of looking at the world, any others are forbidden.

The few remaining media of influence – the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic – have almost been forced to take up left of center marketing positions, since people on the “right” have their own media now and don’t tend to pay attention to any others.

Media organizations have learned to find their own marketing niches in order to survive – the Times and the Post by reporting on President Trump and challenging him. Even the once centrist CNN re-inventing its tepid self an aggressively anti-Trump medium.

The problem is that partisanship has become profitable because it gives the news corporations marketing opportunities that draw advertisers looking for ways to reach specific buyers.

Fox makes a billion dollars a year by targeting older white men. They are grumpy and angry, but they also have lots of money to spend and plenty of advertisers who want to reach only them.

Advertisers hate to waste money on people who are not potential customers.

Fox has made it very easy for them.

Men love their toys.

A business report in the Atlantic recently on the “Trump Effect” on Cable News found that the network has destroyed the GOP, pluralism, and all adult and journalistic standards of ethics, responsibility, and decency.

And their profits are soaring.

A year before Donald Trump was elected, cable news appeared to be fading; it was in its twilight. He changed all of that.

According to the respected Pew Research Project, in 2015, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC all saw their profits surge.

New York Times media critic Jim Ruttenberg wrote about news organizations plastering Trump stories on every chyron and headline in a desperate and successful effort to win new viewers and make a lot of money.

After reaching a 21st-century peak in 2008, the average primetime viewership across the three cable news channels fell by a third by 2014. The median age of Americans watching CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News was 61, 63, and 67. In short, cable news was and is a gerontocratic kingdom where Fox News serves, asking, with more than twice the CNN audience and triple that of MSNBC.

Since Trump descended that escalator in June of 2016, wrote Derek Thompson in the Atlantic, cable news’ fortunes—particularly CNN’s—have been ascendant. Total primetime viewership for the three channels grew by 8 percent in 2015, and profits soared by about a fifth at both CNN and Fox News.

Trump may be destroying U.S. democratic norms, but he appears, for the moment, to be one big beautiful orange life raft for the flagging cable news business.

CNN has averaged 2.2 million total viewers in prime time through the first week of April 2020, more than double its viewership in the fourth quarter of 2019, and roughly 57% higher than its election-season peak, according to Nielsen data.

Fox News is up nearly 50% since the end of last year and has over four million viewers in prime-time, increasing its lead over its two main rivals.

The three networks have also seen large audience gains.

Although Trump loves to rail at “fake news,” he is its main supplier, and they are his most enthusiastic recipients and enablers. They are in business together.

It’s a convenient myth to suggest that Fox News is responsible for the mess the country is in. It takes a Media Village to create a monster like Trump. And Fox is a relatively small piece of the overall media pie.

I mean, let’s be honest. Grumpy old white men are not the favorite target of most businesses.

 Trump has shattered almost every principle of responsible journalism, standards that were sacrosanct for generations, shaping American politics.

Journalists were the enforcers, the watchers, the institution of accountability, a check and balance. See what happens without them.

Cable created this sensational new reality – they broadcast lies and distortions day and night, month after month, year after year. Trump says something almost every day that would have forced any other candidate or President into ruin, resignation, or impeachment long ago.

His assaults on the Constitution make Watergate look like a parking violation. He has reduced the powerful GOP to a cowardly and increasingly corrupt rabble of butt-kissers.

Modern media has figured out how to handle Trump by hiding behind the idea of faux fairness and equivalence.

The new ethos is he-said and she-or he-said. And then said it all again, 24/7.

There is no longer any great injustice or unacceptable behavior in this business arrangement.  Not lies, corruption, racism, or sexual harassment.

It is all on the one hand, and on the other hand, all of our politics is not a reality show.

There is no consensus on truth, fairness, decency, or morality. The poor citizen is overwhelmed by information, much of it false. How can an ordinary person sort it out?

Even the professionals can’t keep up with it.

A veteran reporter explained Washington to me this way: “Trump is a shitstorm, there is so much of it flying around and it smells so bad nobody can keep up with it.”

To appease his many oil and coal supporters, Trump pretends that he believes that climate change is a hoax, and has wiped out almost every climate change regulation or agreement. Much of it was hard-fought.

When fires burn up a million acres of forest in the Northwest, it is not presented as a scandal enabled by a complacent U.S. government; it is simply another he-said, she said political debate. Another argument.

Trump has made it so that there is no such thing as an outrage; everything is outrageous.

The New York Times coverage summed up the problem this way on its digital home page:

 “Joe Biden attacked President Trump’s record on climate change, saying his inaction and denial had fed destruction.

 President Trump blamed the wildfires not on climate change but on the failure by western states to manage their forests.“

An argument, not a catastrophe. Pick one, pick the other. We just present the arguments; you are on your own. 

The New York Times clearly knows better than to accept Trump’s absurd position at face value; they report on climate change all the time.

Presenting it as an argument (one that even Trump is known not to believe) legitimizes the idea that climate change is a hoax, even as it destroys the lives of hundred sof thousands of people and kills many others.

They make it easy to dismiss it.

Every day, Trump holds one kind of press conference or another and lies about almost everything he says. Every day, the media broadcasts and reports his lies, and then claim to be shocked to discover that millions of people believe them.

And why shouldn’t they?

Most people assume that if cable news channels broadcast hours and hours of commentary and opinion from a President, it might be true. Why would they broadcast if they knew it was a lie?

What a good question.

The answer is really quite simple. It makes money, even if the price we all pay is the erosion of our electoral system, our country’s future, and the criminal misrepresentation of a pandemic.

Trump and the media love to pretend to hate each other, but that is another lie, this time on both sides.

Journalists follow Trump around everywhere, fly on his plane, ride in his motorcades, wait for him like hungry puppies on the White House lawn, slobbering eagerly to pass on ever falsehood and vicious attack, and pretend they are challenging him.

They are his court-in-waiting, his transmitters, and broadcasters, his heralds. Once in a while, they ask him a tough question; most of the time, they just repeat what he says and call it work.

Challenging him would mean getting out of the White House, going home, talking to humans,  and reporting on the government rather than be the willing transmitter of lies and cruelty.

Joe Biden is not nearly as charismatic as Trump, nor is he so willfully outrageous and sensational. He will never get as much air time as Trump does.

He is fortunate that Trump is so obnoxious and hateful now that so many people are coming to hate him and are getting weary of his nastiness.

But even then, it is close. He has months left to take over thousands of hours of air time and talk and talk. He is Big Brother in 1984, always on the wall.

Journalists are happy to transmit every lie about the President’s opponent – that he is senile, demented, corrupt, and stupid. That he hates God and supports the murder of police officers. They add a few timid disclaimers and hold their noses.

Journalism puts some lotion on their culpability by using words like “undocumented,” or “without evidence,” as if every viewer will notice this and dismiss the accusations as false.

We see every day that this doesn’t happen.

Tens of millions of Americans believe the pandemic was a hoax, that Antifa killers are organizing to murder conservatives, that our election system is riddled with fraud, that socialists are planning to take over the country.

Journalism was never meant to be an enabling institution. It evolved, for all of its flaws, as a check on power and its abuse.

Greedy corporations changed all of those lofty ideas; profit comes first and trumps any other democratic value.

Trump is our first truly media President.

Neither he nor his fawning Fox commentators and supporters believe a single word they say. There is no ideology involved, only ratings and money.

The network founders were right – ratings have destroyed the credibility of broadcast news.

Fox sets the agenda for our lazy President, who has none of his own, and everybody profits: Trump has a powerful mouthpiece waiting to praise and defend him, and Fox makes a billion dollars.

That is how Corporate Think works.

We put up with it; we deserve it. We watch and listen, and then go on Facebook and Twitter to argue and stew.

Is there a silver lining in this mess? I think so. Organizations like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic are also thriving, expanding their digital footprints and calling Trump on some of his worst instincts and lies.

They have done some astounding reporting in the last two years. When this nightmare ends, which it inevitably will, we will owe them a great debt.

Trump may have boosted the earnings of Fox News, but he is also boosting the earnings and audience of lots of other media outlets as well. He is saving journalism in a number of ways.

I don’t buy the idea that journalism is dead; I buy the idea that journalism deserved to die in its old form and is already re-inventing itself for the future.

Look for some powerhouse news on new media, from Tik Tok to the new kind of newspaper.

Trump has spurred a great awakening among women,  suburban and otherwise, African-Americans,  black and white journalists,  young people, and ordinary Americans who yearn for a more normal life and a more empathetic President.

Wouldn’t it be nice, said a recent TV ad, if we didn’t wake up worrying what the President said, and if the President woke up worrying about us?

The New York Times digital platform has exploded; the Washington Post has hired more than 50 new reporters this year alone.

Journalism’s finest and most influential hours (think William Paley at CBS), John Knight, even William  Randolph Hearst) were funded by millionaires and wealthy business people,  who expanded the media’s reach and power.

Some were better than others, but they paid for journalism to be relevant and vigilant.

That is happening again.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has insulated the Washington Post from the hemorrhaging affecting most newspapers, Laurene Powell Jobs has made the Atlantic the most influential and substantial magazine in America. She and Bezos can give their publications a lot of support for a very long time.

They are two of the richest people on the planet.

These people and publications are re-shaping our journalism idea, beginning its inevitable revitalization, recognizing its importance. In a curious way, we are going back to the old way of doing it.

Just as women are learning the importance of women in positions of power,  the country is learning the consequences of leaving journalism to Hedge Fund ghouls and cereal manufacturers and corporate cable channels.

We see that journalism needs to change, just like police departments need to change.

A lot of people in America have learned a lot of lessons in the past four years. I am one of them.

 

One of the great ironies of  Trumpism is that so many of its followers, even the so-called Christians,  are wary and mistrustful of the needy and the vulnerable, who they feel are dirty and dangerous,  take advantage of us and waste our resources.

The irony is this: their beloved leader, Donald Trump, turns out to be the neediest and most vulnerable of us all, according to a wrenching new book about him.

___

So where are we today on the story of the runaway train we call our President and his all-encompassing campaign to stay in power?

The wolves are circling and smell blood. The pandemic is out of control. This is far beyond what the polls say, or what the pundits shout on TV.

Reading some excerpts from his niece Mary Trump’s new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, coming out Tuesday,   I found her insights into the President’s life and childhood riveting, even poignant.

And her stories are credible, mostly because we already know and have seen that almost everything she says is right. So far, she is the only person able to tell us where Donald Trump really came from.

This is especially relevant today, as the Supreme Court sets up the President for what some call a victory, and others, including me, see as the most dangerous investigation yet into the darkest side of his life.

John Roberts can take credit for saving him for now, but he has also just thrown him under the bus.

From the President and Mary Trump’s book, I get the sense of a fragile and deeply troubled personality abused in childhood and now facing a closing circle of challenges and dangers

His missteps will torment and unhinge him. And they will almost certainly trigger another round of crippling mistakes just when he needs to be disciplined and strategic.

In many ways, the story of Donald Trump is not about power. It’s about children and what cruelty can do to them and turn them into.

The thing that I learn from watching Trump these last few days and reading Mary Trump’s book is not that he is strong and fierce, but that he is small and weak.

He is one of the most fragile public figures I can remember seeing.

There is no slight too small or trivial to enrage him, or that he can leave behind.

People have created a monster Trump in their minds, as he wants to be seen in that way, but he is really a five-year-old with a country he has to pretend he can run.

Presidents have a lot of power, perhaps too much, we are learning. But the White House can also be a place for a wounded child to hide and plot and pay back the world.

Consider these insights, unchallenged even by some of Trump’s closest friends: Mary writes that Trump’s ego “is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”

Ms. Trump, a trained and experienced clinical psychologist who wrote her scathing yet somewhat empathetic book about the President, persuaded me early on that Donald Trump is not capable of either discipline or strategic thinking.

He is not capable of thinking ahead or making reasoned judgments. He is not capable of righting himself; he can only be himself and hope for the best. He doesn’t have another lane.

As we can see every day, every decision he makes refers back to him and his naked narcissism.

This illness is what makes him plow ahead with catastrophes like Tulsa, which was all about his ego, not his judgment, or the coronavirus, which cannot simply be denied and wished away without penalty.

In a job with great responsibility to others, he never gets one step away from himself. When he tries to look caring, he lowers his voice and looks down. He just looks false, he can’t even fake it.

Yes, the polls will go up and down, and yes, the election will go up and down, that’s what they do. But it’s apparent that this is a deeply flawed human being who is under far too much pressure given his fractured psyche and aloneness to respond to anything but his own needs and desires.

Why I wonder, can’t journalists say what they know? I guess, to be generous because it changes the narrative they need to present to be relevant and valuable. What will become of them when the game is over?

As awful as his presidency has been, this is a very small and frail man with a cold and disheartening story acting out his nightmares right in front of everyone day after day.

It is hard for me to watch, but also impossible to ignore. He lashes out and reaches into every corner of our lives. Don’t we all know a kid like that, whose anger hides his fear?

Mary Trump’s style is credible and urgent, and more importantly, it squares with almost everything we see and feel about this man, nearly destroyed by his cruel and domineering father when he was young.

The media is playing it’s usual who won-who lost parlor game after the Supreme Court ruling today that found that Donald Trump is not above the law. They also kept his tax returns out of the public eye through the election.

The pundits are already fighting about who won and who lost as if this is the playoff round before the World Series.

There are no winners to be found anywhere in this latest chapter of the Fall of Donald Trump, the title of the next big book about him.

Nothing – nothing – has obsessed Trump more than his belief that he is above the law and cannot be questioned, investigated, disagreed with, or reproached. It is the most consistent and obsessive theme of his presidency, his defining value.

It has been driving him crazy from the first days in office.

The law does not apply to him, nobody – not Congress, Democrats, Special Prosecutors, Whistle-Blowers, Watchdogs, U.S. Senators – have the right defy or block or challenge him.

He even claimed on national TV that he had full power to tell all the governors what to do about the coronavirus. He never mentioned it again.

The bodies of people who tried to rein him in are all over Washington, indeed all around his business associates in New York City. There, Trump was always considered a joke. Now, he is regarded as an awful and scary joke, like the fictional Joker himself.

How would you like to be waiting over the next year for your worse nightmare to come into being? The thing you have feared the most and fought the hardest to keep from happening is now certain to happen.

I feel a bit alone when it comes to writing about what I see as a wrenching political Death Watch- people write about Trump as if he were Zeus –  but I’m not into the he-said, she-said thing.

Anybody can see it. He is choking on grievance and self-pity.

I know what I see, and I am grateful to be free to write it. People need to make up their minds, but the pattern becomes clearer almost by the day.

The fact that a team of prosecutors and investigators have me in their sights for many months ahead would be an awful prospect for me or a healthy person to wait for and live with. It’s a dread nightmare for a paranoid narcissist who has so much to hide.

When one considers the extraordinary effort he has put into hiding his financial secrets, Sherlock himself could only conclude there must be something awful to hide.

Look how furious and unmoored the Russian investigation and the impeachment investigation left him; he still tweets about it every day. He tries to smear, silence, even jail, his political opponents, who he blames for it.

Reading Mary Trump’s book, I see that it is because he is terrified of everyone who threatens him in any way, from a 16-year-old girl to Angela Merkel to Joe Biden.

Now,  when he needs to be savvy and articulate and strategic, he is none of those things. He is not able to be any of those things.

His race-baiting will work with some people, but this is a different America than he faced even four years ago. The corporate and civic and medical and educational structure of the country is mobilizing against him in shocking and previously unimaginable ways.

The clock is ticking, whether we see the tax returns or never see them. I can’t say I care.

We can just imagine what’s in them. In a sense, it’s a juicy weapon for Joe Biden.

The people who have investigated him say they know what’s in there: the answer to his unwavering deference to Alexandr Putin. What else could it be? We know about his debts and bankruptcies and frauds.

What could be worse?

What else would frighten him so much and get him to fight so hard?

Trump’s ego has taken an awful – and to a narcissist, unacceptable –  beating in recent weeks, from Tulsa to his Bible photo-op to the NFL to Nascar to a pandemic he and his allies have not found a way to threaten or control.

To look bigger, he runs to the big mountain and gives the audience a show, fireworks and jet planes, and bands. If you can’t cajole, children, you distract them.

The Tik-Tok kids – he is now threatening to ban the site in America – pulled off the mask. Trump is picking up where they left off. Kim Jong Un blew up the negotiating building. The Iranians ignore and defy him.  His former friend Xi Jinping shut down freedom of speech in Hong Kong, and no longer speaks to him.

Generals and corporate execs are abandoning him, Dr. Fauci, confined now to podcasts,  has broken out of his confinement, his Jacksonville coronation is in great trouble, and even the stock market has started to tremble again as new realities sing in.

“While thousands of Americans die alone,” wrote Mary Trump in her book, “Donald touts stock market gains.”

The narcissist sees every event as a salute or slight to him, from Mt.Rushmore to the Fourth of July, to Tulsa to Jacksonville. But he has dug himself a big hole, and he keeps digging.

Wouldn’t we all wish to return to our biggest successes? Most of us know we can’t.

Jacksonville is in trouble; there, he faces another humiliating disaster and reality check at the moment of his supposed greatest triumph. More than 500 people in Tulsa now have the virus; health officials say they got it at the rally.

He made it; he did it, he ran, he won, he battled and dodged and plotted and weaved and schemed, and survived every rock and missile and mine in his path.

Now, on the eve of another great victory, the ground under his feet is shaking and crumbling and sinking.

He has neither the psychological or spiritual strength to handle it, as Mary Trump and his behavior make clear.

If you believe in psychology at all – I’ve had too many years of therapy – it’s all there to see. The fear, the rage, the flight, the bad decisions.

I don’t ever compare myself to a President, but I can say I’ve been to that awful place.

Covered in all that fear and bluster and hiding, it’s almost impossible to make a good decision, and if you try, you just look worse and weaker than before. There is nothing more disturbing than a sick man trapped and with nowhere to go.

There is nothing more healing than knowing the truth about yourself.

Today Fauci today urged cities with a growing virus to consider shutting down again; he said the pandemic was becoming his worst nightmare.

The President said again he doesn’t agree with him.

I don’t believe it matters one bit when and if we see his tax returns. The Supreme Court ruling casts another very dark cloud over a man who can’t handle them.

The people who dislike him also know who he is, and nothing he has done would surprise them. The people who love him don’t care what the tax returns tell us.

Once those records get into the hands of prosecutors, the world will see whatever it is that Donald Trump has tried so desperately to hide all of these years. If he is not in the office, he will be even more powerless to stop it.

That is precisely what he seems unable to bear. If he believes he could shoot someone on Park Avenue and get away with it, why would he care what’s in those returns?

In great desperation, he turns to the people who love him so blindly and ignores the very people who might save him.

The protests have toned down; the dread Antifa have yet to appear.

The radical leftists are not to be found; Joe Biden is happy in his basement, corporations and schools are abandoning the confederacy in overwhelming numbers, all kinds of athletes, black and white, are getting ready to kneel when the national anthems are played.

And get this: Yesterday, Disney signed up Colin Kaepernick, the father of the taking the knee movement, to a first-look deal  via his production firm to “focus on telling scripted and unscripted stories that explore race, social injustice, and the quest for equity.”

This is the man President Trump called a “son-of-a-bitch” just two years ago. This is not the America of 2016. When Disney, NASCAR, Coca-Cola, FedEx,  and the NFL blow you off, you are in the muck. They know where the wind blows.

Every one of them has a message for the President. You are wrong, and we don’t need to listen to you.

He will surely do a lot of damage along the way. All the way back to slavery, white people have feared a black revolution. Many sociologists even trace police brutality back to this primal fear.

Every police reporter – I was one – knows that a cop who shoots a black man for no reason is often not a racist.

Most often, he has been taught to be afraid of black people, even kids. Trump is playing to that; it is vampiric but often effective.

The President’s bumbling and stumbling about the coronavirus will haunt him.

Now, he has once again reclaimed ownership of the virus as his own by insisting schools open fully in the Fall, whether the doctors like it or not.

That means he will own every illness and death every child or their family suffers right up to the campaign. Every death of every kid and every teacher will be on him. No one except Sean Hannity will let him forget it, either.

Trump set it up so that people would blame the governors, now there is no one to blame but him, and his obedient governors are scurrying for cover like rats.

The Supreme Court has re-ignited the darkest, most paranoid, and dangerous part of President Trump – nothing has terrified or distracted or unraveled him more than the prospect of being investigated by prosecutors and investigators that he can’t control.

Reading those excerpts, I felt sorry for Trump. If he were anyone else, we would all feel sorry for him. Because he can’t feel empathy for anyone but himself, people can’t feel any pity for him.

So it turns. If he were still a child, he would break our hearts.  And in many ways, he is still a child. Some kids do not get the chance to grow up.

There is nothing ahead for him but more trouble, more humiliation, more recrimination, more enemies, more traitors and cowards heading for the hills.

He knows now that he is not above the law, and that is the very last place he ever wanted to be. In his head, he is weaker, more impulsive, more frightened and desperate than ever before. And it shows.

The real story of Donald Trump can’t be found in the White House, as John  Bolton and so many others have learned.

It can only be understood through the story of his family, as ours define our stories.

It is not a story of power, but rather of how we damage our young and turn them into lost and dangerous souls.

That may be the most important part of the legacy he will leave behind.