Search Results for: The Trump Hour

“The reason it hurts so much to separate is that our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we’ve lived a thousand lives before this one, and in each of them, we’ve found each other…” – Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook.

This is perhaps the second or third time I’ve said goodbye to Donald Trump. I think it is the last. I could hate him sometimes, and he broke my heart at other times.

We endure what is unbearable, wrote Cassandra Clark in Clockwork Princess, “and you bear it. That is all.” I’ve borne it; life goes on.

The very sincere managers of the Democratic Impeachment effort wanted, as so many progressives did, to say goodbye to Mr. Trump once and for all, to end it; they couldn’t bear it any longer.

They wanted to make sure he could never come back.

Admirable and courageous, yes, and perhaps even necessary, it’s not for me to say. But idealism often collides head-on with human beings’ true nature, and it is just not fated to end that way.

He will earn his goodbye; you can count on it.

The problem is that you can’t kill such a big idea by impeaching it; you have to offer the transfixed and manipulated people who loved him a better idea.

That can’t be done in an impeachment trial; it will take years, blood, and a lot of heart, courage, and good faith. I accept that justice works in odd and indirect ways.

Donald Trump has poisoned the well, and it won’t be safe to drink for a while. He was a lot more like Merlin than I gave him credit for. He can cast spells. But he isn’t God.

What is that feeling, wrote Jack Kerouac in On The Road, when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain until you see their specks dispersing?

It is, he answered, the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. That’s how I feel when my spirit waves goodbye to Donald Trump.

I know most people reading this dislike him intensely, but I have a soft spot for Mitch McConnell, the craftiest and least repentant old fox in a city of foxes.

I think he understood that Donald Trump wasn’t really worth impeaching, that he was already impeached, disgraced, and convicted in the soul. Lord, what else can you do that wasn’t done in those heartbreaking videos

. Trump carries the whiff of misery and shame now like a dog carries the stench of something he rolled in.

Perhaps those craven Republican senators saw what McConnell saw – Trump is over, finished and disgraced. Let the wolves in suits in a dozen cities run him down and chew him up.

A month ago, he was the most powerful man on earth.

Now, he’s a ghost from Shakespeare, running and running from himself. He will never escape.

Starting Monday, he’s a big fat bullseye for the smartest and meanest lawyers in the country. He’s a juicy meal.  If the lawyers after him came after me, I’d try to make a run for it to Costa Rico, and failing that; I’d throw myself off a big tall bridge.

One of our most wealthy and powerful men, Harvey Weinstein, could tell you about that.

I have confessed that I felt that Donald Trump and I were soul connected somewhere along the line. We had each lived a few lives before we came across one another, and it was inevitable that we would part.

I didn’t change Donald Trump’s life in any way, he has never heard my name, but he changed my life, and for good.

We had a kind of twisted love affair in some ways. I spent many hours reading about him, studying about him, thinking about him.

I was the biographer falling in love with his subject in my own weird way. I had to understand him, not hate him. I had to figure him out so I wouldn’t be afraid of him.

He was my spiritual litmus test.

Either I could stay grounded in the face of his continuous provocation and cruelty, or I could descend into the circle of hate and pointless argument I was hearing and seeing all around me.

He got into my head, but he can’t stay there. That is the chronicler’s dark side, they can’t love anyone for too long either, there is always something crazier and more compelling just around the corner.

I didn’t want to be him; I didn’t want to be them; I wanted to end up being me once I figured out who that was.  He made that very difficult at times, but every time he was cruel and dishonest, I went out and committed a small act of great kindness.

It is arrogant of me even to begin to compare myself to so famous, beloved, and wealthy a man. But there was this: our souls did connect. I could feel it.

I was broken, too. But I was so much luckier than him, for all of his wealth and power. I got help. The people who loved me helped me get help and helped me.

I found that love began to heal; everything I learned and saw about him screamed that he had never known love and couldn’t even imagine it. Everybody else saw him as having great and undefeatable strength. But it was all just another lie, underneath there was nothing but fear and weakness.

The people who feel that can smell it.

Some people walk alone in the world, and if they are not Marvel Superheroes, they are the unhappiest people on earth.

I came to understand the truth about myself before it was too late, and I still had time to change. I didn’t want to end my life in the way it was. Trump’s great tragedy was that he couldn’t change the way it was.

I wanted to love people outside of myself. I wanted to face the truth about myself. I wanted to change in every part of my soul.

“You’ll stay with me?” Harry Potter asked James. “Until the very end,” James replied. Donald Trump couldn’t stay with us, of course, and we won’t really ever get to see him again, although that is so hard for so many people to believe.

And who now, really, wants to stay with him who doesn’t get paid for it?

That’s where we parted, of course, long before either of us ended up being who we were for good.

Donald Trump never cared about a single human being in the world other than himself, he had no call to love to pull him out of himself. Can we name one single human being who loved him rather than feared him?

He couldn’t find the humility it requires to see oneself truthfully. He could only love in abstracts and generalities; he could only love mobs of people, not people.

At the end of the impeachment, I went back to look over some of the haunting videos the Democratic managers had put together.

The one that stuck in my mind and touched the most deeply into my heart was where he looked into his South Lawn camera and said goodbye to the people who came from all over the country to support him, to answer his call for help.

I think they were the only people in his life that he trusted at the end. Watching them in those videos, I saw that they were broken too.

And when he finished that awkward and brutally insincere call for peace, I think he said the only honest and heartfelt and real thing I ever saw or heard him say:

“I love you,” he said, “I will never forget you.”

Maybe that was a Hollywood line, as stiff as his others. But looking at it, it seemed to come straight from the heart, the only ones that did. He wasn’t talking to me, and he wasn’t talking to you. He was talking to them, and it felt so sincere.

He and the other broken people, the other ones roughed up by life and abandoned by almost everyone who had ever promised to help, had connected.

He knew by then that he was finished. He was saying goodbye to the only people he had ever loved or would probably ever love.

J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan,  had his hero say, “never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”

I’ll say goodbye, Donald Trump, and yes, good riddance,  I can’t, when all i is said and done, claim to love you.

But I will never forget you.

 

Exclusive: If you stare at the Scooby-Doo 10,000 Volt Ghost Electric Monster in the photo above, you may notice an eerie resemblance to the soon-to-be almost former President. He has the same scowl and the same hair.

Watching him over the summer and especially over the last two weeks, I couldn’t help wondering if he took “Dictator and Violent Overthrow of Government” lessons from the Scooby-Doo Book of Villians, especially  Electric Monster.

In the Scooby-Doo lexicon, the 10,000-volt ghost was the disguise of Mr. Voltner, who faked his own death and pretended to be his own ghost in order to scare people and chase them away.

The Monster even looks like Trump, especially his hair and that permanent scowl. When I first saw that scowl, I thought, this is a  humorless and joyless man who just took an enema, or who needs one.

That scowl is embedded into Trump’s face and jaw.

Everyone I know and am close to – even many of his supporters – tell me they can’t wait until Donald Trump gets his military parade tomorrow morning and finally gets on Air Force One and flies out of Washington and away from his life of tweets.

They seem to have this fantasy that they will be done with him and his tweets, that life will return to normal. I don’t think so.

Trump is taking the idea normal away with him when he goes. And he’s leaving Senators Cruz and Hawley behind to be calculating and hateful.

I’m not sure we’ll ever see normal in the old day again. But I bet it will be better.

As president, Trump appears to have only one outrage left in him, the wave of pardons he’s preparing to sign before he leaves office.  A good day for his shady friends and a host of Putin lovers.

We know there will never be much peace while this man lives, but the noise level should go down by quite a bit. It already has. When we will see those tax returns.

For me, life will never be the same, and I would be lying if a part of me didn’t admit to being emotional about his farewell and if I didn’t also admit that in some ways, I would miss him. How often do you get to write about somebody like that?

When you study some for months, even years, and he or she changes your life, and you write about them and read a score of books about them, you can ask any reporter: you can’t help but attach to them in emotional ways.

Donald Trump has become a part of me, he is in my head, and there will be some emptiness in my life and work when he is gone. I can’t think of any other figure in my life who has dominated our common space as much as he has and engaged my attention for as long.

Trump helped to make me a true patriot, I think, not a blockhead playing at one. He helped me form an Army Of Good, and we have done tons of good.

He inspired me to work hard on developing a spiritual, rather than a political response to his cruelty and corruption. He helped to deepen my commitment to being truthful and to see the cancer that lying is.

He taught me what democracy is worth, and reminded me that I can’t simply leave it to other people to protect and defend our idea about freedom and the peaceful transition of power.

Shakespeare was a genius when it came to creating Mad Kings and villains, but Trump puts him to shame regarding cruelty and complexity and prideful and unrepentant rage. I can’t forgive him for what he did to the refugees and immigrants.

Trump, then, has very few redeeming qualities. He is not a nice person. He has no empathy. He cares nothing for the needy or the vulnerable.

He hides behind people who take care of him and then tosses them away, often in the most vicious sand thoughtless of ways.

Even the people who love him have little good to say about him. His accomplishments – there are a number of them – are structural and conceptual. No help for refugees, no worrying about the environment, no associations with allies, no rights for laborers, his deference to and fascination with despots and dictators, and his utter lack of integrity or sense of personal honor.

He is just a lousy human being. No wonder he doesn’t have dogs.

This year, I encountered a lot of Trump messengers unhappy with what I was writing.

Some were eager to engage in a civil and useful dialogue, most seemed, angry, nasty, and whiney to me as if they were the first and only people in America who had ever suffered or been disappointed by their government.

I love to argue with people, but the Trump people who came onto my blog were rarely much fun. They showed up, called me names, and vanished as a rule. They never stopped to argue. They never imagined that Trump might lose the election.

So they chose not to believe it.

As he leaves, the country finds a lot of soul searching and reflection. When did the idea of liberal democracy become so detached from ordinary people and their lives.

Can the Republican Party survive as a far-right and white Christian minority, and who will pay attention to the infrastructure or other complex tasks of government now that Trump has left a government in shambles?

Trump did punch a lot of holes in our democracy, our smugness, and our insistence that we were great. I think a lot of us learned that we are not yet great, but would like to be.

Trump turned out to be a racist and white nationalist, after all, he was a dark stain on the national soul, one it will be difficult to wash out.

Why we want to know, did such an unlikeable and incompetent leader get so many people to love him and vote for him, and what does this tell us about our democracy and the sickness of national purpose that seems to be spreading like a pandemic all its own?

It is simple to make fun of Donald Trump and ridicule and condemn him; believe me, it is hard to understand him. I think I will most miss trying to figure him out, I don’t recall a more creative or spiritual challenge.

Donald Trump has burrowed deeply into my conscience and consciousness. One of the fascinating things about him as the Brooding King prepares to leave us for Castle Mar-A-Largo and the next reality sh0w is the dichotomy and civic schizophrenia that he represents, at least to me:

He is loveless, at times he is disgusting; he hates the very idea of democracy and is capable of great evil. He has no ideas for America beyond grievance, greed, and selfishness.

He is almost primally dangerous, yet he is also the most hapless and even clueless villain that I have ever read about, studied, or encountered. If you look at what he did rather than what he promised, he comes out more like a clown than a rebel leader.

How can any writer worth a roll of toilet paper not miss writing about someone like this, a genuine sociopath with almost unlimited power and arrogance and a hatred for the very system that elected and sustains him?

If you ever wondered what really happens when the inmates take over the asylum, pay attention to the news.

It is still hard for me to fathom how he blew an almost guaranteed re-election day by day, stupid by stupid move, from Tulsa to his debate catastrophe, to his bungling of the pandemic,  from his absolute refusal to win a single vote he didn’t have before.

One of the big shocks for me about the riot at the capitol was the realization that Trump not only provoked the riot, but he was the riot; there is no space between him and the rioters, they are opposite ends of the same thing: clueless, hapless and stunningly incompetent.

How could he have stopped it, or even tried? It would be like forgetting to spray that nest on his head a golden brown or orange, or turning a gun on himself?

A runaway truck can do great harm, but it has no consciousness.

A President and his thousands of followers are presumed to think and reason, judge consequence, and possess some judgment to tell fantasy from reality.

I can resent him and regret him, but I have never been frightened of him because he screws up every single thing he has ever done, from marriage to gambling to business to porn stars to sexual predation to a pandemic.

The love affair with the mad child from North Korea, his romance with Alexandr Putin,  stealing an election to staging a coup – this  would have been hilarious if weren’t also so frightening and ultimately tragic.

It turns out that Trump really thought he could overturn the election if he just charmed some of those people to count and certify elections. He really did things his Supreme Court Justices would save him. He really did think his Storm Troopers would seize control of the government and halt Biden’s victory.

It turns out he doesn’t know it is illegal to pressure voting officials to “find” enough votes for him to win. Or that his followers are not stronger than the federal government.

He didn’t know that if you incite a cranked up mob that has been lied to every day for months, something bad will happen.

He and his followers mirror one another. There is no space between them; there is no way he can criticize them, stop them, or shame them. It would be like rejecting his own soul. Better to go down with them than break away.

When you see his supporters’ stories, then his presidency starts to make sense. This is no Hitler, as I’ve said 100 times. This is a Scooby-Doo Villain.

Joshua Matthew Black lives in Alabama.

He says he came to Washington on January 6, another day that will live in infamy, answering his leader’s call to come and save his country. It was a chance to join in his own Lexington and Concord, and how often do you get a chance to save your country?

According to The Washington Post,   Black appeared in a video posted to YouTube two days after the attack. In the video, he proudly admits to entering the Capitol and displays his carrying a knife.

There is absolutely nothing in the video that suggests in any way that he knew he was committing a crime, perhaps more than one.

“Once we found out that Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the election, like, officially, the crowd went crazy. I mean, it became a mob…I wanted to get inside the building so I could plead the blood of Jesus over it. That was my goal.”

An unnamed Trump supporter with a Nazy swastika tattoo on his neck told the FBI that he was shocked to learn that it was illegal for him to ransack a Senator’s office and steal his papers.

“It can’t be illegal,” he told one agent who came for him, “My President asked me to do it, and he is the President.”

There was the Qanon leader who demanded organic food in jail, and the young man who brought his mother to Washington so she could see him help smash up the capitol.

Online, scores of people brought up a meme from “The Simpsons” in which a character named Jimbo Jones is shown holding a camcorder with the caption, “videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we’ve ever had.”

Perhaps, joked one,  agent, this might be the easiest criminal investigation the FBI had ever conducted, said one agent drily. Maybe the Trump warriors will wear name tags next time.

I think my favorite Trump marauder might be Texas real estate agent Janna Ryan, who used the horrific attack on the capitol to boost her real estate business.

“We’re gonna..go in there, life or death! It doesn’t matter,” she said in a since-deleted, curse-laden video from  Washington. “Y’all know who to hire for your Realtor: Jenna Ryan.”

A Texas home buyer posted a message on Twitter: “She (Jenna) was my realtor, but I fired her,” she said. “We went to look at a house, but instead of getting the key from the lockbox, she ran and jumped through the window chanting USA, USA, and told me to follow her if I was a patriot. I didn’t buy the house.”

When the FBI first questioned Kevon Lyons of Chicago about his video taken outside Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, he told them that he dreamt he was in the Capitol the day of the riot.

They responded by showing him an Instagram of his standing outside Pelosi’s office with a caption that read: Whose House? Our House?”

Keven was impressed. “Wow,” he told the agents, “you’re good. That was only up for an hour.

Five people died in the capitol; others were beaten and threatened with death. You look at these videos, though, and sometimes wonder if these fearsome patriots need a spanking rather than time in jail.

Then there is the grandmother effect, as federal agents are calling it. To hide from the FBI, many rioters have rushed to their grandmother’s houses to escape arrest there. The grandmothers are angry and embarrassed.

“What the hell was he doing there?,” one grandmother asked of her rioting sun, suspected of stealing from several congressional offices. “All he does here is play video games all day.”

Tonight as I struggle with how to feel about Trump’s departure, I wonder at how it is that one person can come so far, do so much damage, and be such a spectacularly incompetent Goofus in so many ways. The truth is that the 10,000-volt monster is a lot scarier.

When Trump was begged and pressured for hours to try to stop the riot and call for his supporters to stop the violence, he recorded a blatantly half-hearted video which ended with this stern rebuke to the rioters: “I love you.”

And that was the only sincere thing he has yet to say about the rioting and deaths. And he spends day after day wondering and whining about the fact that even many of his closest loyalists won’t defend him.

The real question about Trump is always the same. “Why?”

No fame, success, or achievement is enough for him. Whatever he has, he wants more. Whatever he doesn’t have, he wants to have. He has serious mental health concerns.

More than anything, he wants to be loved and admired. More than anything, he really isn’t either. If the rioters seemed addicted to grievances and screens, Trump is addicted to attention and affirmation.

His niece Mary alerted me to the most important thing there is to know about Trump in her wonderful book about her uncle, Too Much And Never Enough.

He is, she said, one of the most dangerous men in the world.

But he is incapable of learning, changing, or strategizing. He has no idea how the real world works. He thinks he has a shot at the Nobel Prize.  These are major weaknesses for a man who tried to stage a coup and take over the world’s most powerful democracy.

So goodbye, Mr. President, I will not soon forget you.  I doubt I will ever forget you.

You have some bumpy times ahead, but then, you always thrive on bumpy times. And you will always the best story of the day, wherever you are.

I think for you, that might be the achievement you prize the most.

Thank you for your continued optimism that our democracy will triumph and endure. I am always hopeful but fearful.  – Paul

I never supported Trump, but I don’t support the idea that everything will be ok now, either. It won’t be.   Jennifer

Expect a Global Emergency Broadcast Sunday or Monday. – Melinda

_____

In this post tonight, I answered all three messages, they all dealt with hope in different ways.

I was touched by them, and the range of them,  I told Jennifer I never once in my life woke up expecting everything to be OK. I always knew better.

That is not what life is about.

Optimism is the expectation that things-the weather, life, politics – will get better.

Hope is the trust that life will fulfill its promise to us and lead us to true freedom. We were never promised paradise.

Every great spiritual leader in history was a person of hope, this is why they all ultimately succeeded against overwhelming odds. The people who drag people downstairs and beat them have no hope, only rage.

I am proud that my blog draws such a wide range of opinions.

Lately, some people thank me for being hopeful; others are pessimistic; others are bleak about the future of our democracy, even hopeless.

Some have lost the ability to see light or promise.

The Trump defenders, who e-mailed me daily and faithfully all through the election, have disappeared, given up, gone to the ground, or retreating into secret chat rooms.

Most of them are not plotting to overtake the country, they are also struggling to keep hope alive.

Once again, I thank Donald Trump and his Cyber Goons And Trolls, they have shown me the alternative to democracy.

Some of them are claiming a great victory from the cruelty and fear they brought to the capitol, they have no idea just how badly they failed.

To do what they did last week speaks of cowardice and a sickness of the mind and soul. We will not see this much of them again for a long time, if ever.

Last week, they got lucky.

They will never be so lucky again.

Unlike many of the people e-mailing me, I believe most people are eager to get on with their lives and are ready to move on. They will get the chance.

They just want things to get better. It will get better.

Clearly, the people who make the most noise get the most attention, even if they say nothing true or real. Our President has proven that for four years.

But that is only one reality, not the whole reality. Be careful what you read and see, and how often you read and see it.

In my case, I believe Paul is correct. I have faith in democracy.

Our democracy is strong, much stronger, it turns out than Trump. He has been defeated and will always be defeated. He is the worst enemy he could ever possibly have.

Trump came, promising to make America great again. He leaves a country in crisis, himself in disgrace, his legacy in shambles, and shame.

I have faith in democracy for all of its many difficulties and weaknesses.

I guess one part of that is being Jewish. Nobody needs to tell me or my family that things aren’t always okay.

Jews understand, as many other peoples do,  that bad things can happen to good people and that dictators sometimes triumph and actually do the horrible things they say they will do.

Life is difficult, people have always looked to people who claim to be strong to save them.

My people know the damage lies can do and how easy it is to get ordinary people to do awful things. Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil. We see it every day on the news. We saw it at the capitol on January 6.

People are always eager and willing to worship power, good or bad. Some people know good from evil and do good, most people do what they are told.

I see the bad, but I also see the good. It was necessary for me, and then became a faith.

The awful things humans do to one another does not make me cynical or hopeless about democracy.

America needs to work, the whole world needs America to work, our country is one of the great experiments in human history.

And I need America to work.

I have moved far from the understandably stern and ritualistic faith of Judaism in my life, edging oddly closer to the love and caring visions of Christ and the early Christian theologians, who dreamed of a kinder world.

These were the better angels of our world, even if so many of the people who call themselves Christians have betrayed Christ and his memory.

I will probably never quite land anywhere. But I do have faith in my country, the past few months and weeks have only enforced that.

I feel like I’ve lived through one of those Superhero movies where the monsters come pouring towards the gate, but never quite make it all the way through.

They were not strong enough in the end. They were beaten back. The world survives.

I have faith in our democracy. The other day, Joe Biden said he wanted a $1.9 trillion relief package, which includes a 15 dollars an hour minimum wage and billions of dollars in aid to states struggling to contain the pandemic.

I smiled when I read about it.  Democracy at work, it is just like making sausage.

Some people loved his proposals; some hated it; soon, the bargaining, trading, and posturing will begin. The thing about democracy, when it works, is that everybody gets a piece of what they want, nobody gets everything they want.

Isn’t that a powerful lesson for life?

(I’d be amazed if this Senate passed the minimum wage proposal. Freedom in a capitalist society wrote Lenin, always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”)

It should be a surprise to no one in our country that billionaires, politicians, and lobbyists hate socialism, it might mean giving money to the poor and the hard-working people.

It’s just too expensive for them. Robbing the people is how they get rich, the oldest story in the world is the rich screwing the poor.

Why, then,  do I have faith in democracy? Because it is the best system I know, not a perfect system.  Like spirituality itself, it is about where we want to go and who we want to be, even if we are not yet there.

America is democracy at its best and worst. Right now we are seeing the worst. And some of the best.

In America, countless people over time have carved good lives for themselves, and there is, surely, a great deal of freedom for some of the people, not yet all of the people.

We keep trying to get it right, and sometimes we succeed, which is more than we can say for most places on the earth. We keep failing and struggling because it is hard.

Because it is hard, it is worthwhile and meaningful.

The struggle of Blacks and women and gay people and poor people for equal rights are among the most stirring stories in human history. Freedom is a cherished thing; it is worth fighting for.

We are still a country where Stacey Abrams can rise up as one and spend a decade transforming one of the most bigoted and repressive places in America.

For me, life without struggle is empty. The struggle is how I learn and grow. The struggle is how I figure out how to be strong and to work long and hard for a spiritual life that will ground and sustain me.

The death of democracy is not likely to be from an insurrection or mob violence. It will come – and nearly came – from a slow extinction, from apathy, ignorance, and lack of honor, and the loss of spiritual or real nourishment.

The economy cannot be the only thing that stirs us. There has to be something more.

We are missing the glue of religion in our lives, and need something to replace it.

I’m not blind, I saw the horrific attack on our capitol. I saw the outraged and very deep response. Our democracy is very much alive. It will take time. It won’t be easy.

Everything will never be 100 percent okay.

But apart from the ugliness and lies and hatred, I’ve seen the most extraordinary awakening, inspired by the most hateful of Presidents. Right now, we are so very much alive and so deeply aware of what democracy means.

Our democracy might yet die, but not now, not yet. Some people think me too hopeful, but there is a lot of reason for hope. I am not prone to cheery outlooks and baseless good cheer.

I follow the data, I follow the news.

Our real crisis is not the insurrection of Stupid White Boys playing patriot, but information. Democracies are built on information; when there is honest information, there is enlightenment and common purpose.

When there is debate, there are solutions.

When information is corrupted, when there is no sharing of information, and power or accountability, then there is abuse, corruption, outrage, and subjugation.

It can be done; it can still be done.

Democracy, said H.L. Mencken, is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.  That is happening. Democracy is a mess, and it is hard; it’s never easy, said, Robert Kennedy.

When we take it for granted, we get in trouble, when we leave democracy in the hands of dishonest and ignorant people, we risk everything. Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Democracy, I am learning, is not about elections; it is about how we live our daily lives, how committed we are to the truth, how much we care about one another and the world we live in.

The true patriot, said Paine, smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress and grows brave by reflection. That is my inspiration now.

I answered Paul, Jennifer, and Melina.

I thanked Paul for spotting what drives me. Thanks, Paul, I do have faith in democracy. I see millions and millions of people and a real Army of  great power rising up to protect it and defend it.

I see the millions of people rising up to destroy it. I would have to be blind not to see it. But that fires me up, it doesn’t make me despair.

As Thomas Paine said, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Is anything precious in life easy?

I see the danger, Melinda, believe me, but what I expect on Sunday morning is for the struggle to be continuing, loudly, angrily, and for the most part, peacefully.

I will be here, you will be here, Maria and the animals, and my life will be here. No, there will not be a Global Emergency Broadcast, if there is any such thing. And there are many people in the world with greater problems than ours.

That is what hope is, that is what faith is, and without both, there is not much of a life at all.

As for Jennifer’s message, I wrote her also and told her that I have never once in my life supported the idea that everything is ok, not when I was 10, not when I was 50,  not now.

I am not aware of any God in any faith who promised that everything is going to be okay all the time.

He or she would be a fraud.

Everything is never all okay. That is what it means to be a human.

That is what it means to love democracy. That is what it means to fight for freedom and decency. That is what it means to be a patriot.

My wish for you and everybody else is that you accept the reality of life and adjust your expectations, or you will never be happy or fulfilled.

 

 

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” – Benjamin Franklin.

As his sufferings mounted, Martin Luther King wrote,  “I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”

What worked for King doesn’t seem to be working for us. There needs to be a new way to transform horror into a creative force.

That is what I decided to do when Donald Trump was elected; I saw a great spiritual challenge coming at me, although I did not imagine anything like what happened Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol. So I turned it into creativity.

As befitting a divided country, there is already another raging debate about what sort of justice should be handed out to our President, who watched TV happily while the capitol was under siege.

At the same time, roving mobs of supporters broke into the Capitol, terrorized legislators, stole what they could, desecrated what they could,  led one of their own to sacrifice, and still managed to kill a policeman.

They were, they boasted, launching a new kind of American Revolution, taking the country back for the people.

America had never seen anything like this; we are all struggling to deal with the aftermath. How did the police miss what even I saw – that January 6 would bring serious trouble?

Our President has promised us as much, and for months.

I have never compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and I don’t now.  Trump is much too weak to be another Hitler. Hitler would have been in front of that mob, smashing windows and breaking in, eager to go to jail for the crimes his supporters were committing.

Donald Trump is a coward; he gets other people to commit his crimes while he hides in his castle, watches TV, gets his face tanned and tweets threats and lies.

But on Wednesday, the images of the Reichstag fire kept coming to mind.

On February 27, 1933, the German parliament building  – the Reichstag – was attacked and burned to the ground. The Nazi leadership used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising, in much the same way right-wing media commentators are trying to blame Antifa and the Democrats for the trashing of the capitol. The Nazi’s refused to accept election results that denied them power. The resulting legislation, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitution protections for Germany and paved the way for the Nazi dictatorship.

The people who burned the Reichstag down were also flag-waving white nationalists, also supported and encouraged by unmoored leaders who believed that they lied enough, people would come to believe them. They were right.

But evil is evil, and no one can really control where it goes, as Wednesday also proved. The attack on the capitol was not an outburst; it was a plot.

Most people at first believed the Nazis had plotted to burn the parliament down; they were not held accountable. Hitler just lied and lied until the lie became the country’s truth.

If you look at the transcripts and recordings of the Nazi storm troopers, you can hear and see the same smug and cruel gestures and words that we saw on Wednesday. They were saving the country, not destroying it.

This is important to understand. Our President brought great evil right to the heart and soul of our democracy.

History is a good guide to the dangers of injustice, turning a blind eye to evil, or rationalizing it, as some Republican senators are already doing just a day or so after Black Wednesday.

I’ve rolled my eyes at comparisons to our own white nationalists to Nazis; it seems so far from our culture and structure.

Aren’t we the country where that can’t happen? No, not now.

I wasn’t rolling my eyes on Wednesday, or today. When the police run in terror from the people, something elemental has been turned upside down.

This wasn’t just an attack on a building. The President who engineered this has to leave.

Donald Trump needs to be held accountable, and anyone who stands with him is not standing for truth, justice, or freedom.

We learn that there are real consequences for lying and hatred, especially when it becomes a new normal. Every lie that goes unpunished cuts a chunk out of us and the kind of country we want to be.

For a couple of hours, I learned what it must have felt like in Berlin in the 1930s, a sinking heart combining disbelief with anger and despair, watching something I never expected to see in America.

I suppose Williamstown was a tipoff; we sloughed off that one. Within weeks of Williamstown, CEOs were showing up at the White House to lunch with President Trump and praise him.

Why was the response to these white demonstrators  Wednesday so jarringly different from every single black protest that went on for weeks and months all over America in 2020?

Why have so many Americans excused and rationalized this behavior instead of blaming Trump, blamed Democrats, the ever-handy Antifa, and the media for the violence?

The answer isn’t that complex. We have lost any common idea of what truth or justice is. The challenge is to restore a common sense of what truth and justice are.

As a former police reporter, I could hardly believe that all of those people walked in and out of the capitol almost at will for hours with few, if any arrests. Where were the police in one of the most heavily policed cities on earth?

How could they have failed us so tragically? This has become a conspiracy theory all of its own, which is heartbreaking.

We are starting to get some answers. Our democracy, not just our capitol,  was under attack.

The countless black and brown children in America were absolutely correct in saying none of them would have made it up the capitol steps alive if they had done what Trump’s Storm Troopers had done.

All across the country, there were reports of black outrage at the double standards.

My stomach sank as hour after hour passed, and nobody came to a stop as our elected leaders ran for their lives.

This was the most powerful lesson in racism in America in my lifetime.  Joe Biden was wrong when he said the violence “was not who we are.” It is precisely who we are and have been from the first.

Blessedly, it is not all that we are.

Our own national truth begins there.

In the age of polarization and hyper-media and online tribalism, there is no such thing as reasoned and civil consideration of justice. Lying and hatred have become a profitable industry.

That should be against the law.

Whatever happens, to Donald Trump will not be nearly enough for many people, no matter how reasoned or just.

It’s true; lies beget lies, ignorance begets ignorance, hatred begets hatred. We have stood by quietly while our country has become an incubator of dishonesty and hatred.

Cicero said about justice. “For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is the right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.”

Justice isn’t about pleasing everyone, which is not possible in America right now. Justice is about doing the right thing insofar as we can sort it out and see it.

Lincoln believed that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. I think history has shown us this is true. Trump deserves mercy. So do his followers.

But what is justice in the case of Donald Trump, who brazenly and repeatedly inspired this evil, cheered it on, refused to help end it or stop it, and celebrated it at every opportunity.

And what is mercy in a situation like this?

I think mercy is remembering that many millions of people voted for Trump and support him still. To me, that is the sickness afflicting our country right now and the source of our despair.

But they are not all one thing, they are many things.

Trump and his followers should be treated forcefully, but also with respect, even the people who broke into the capitol. But they must still be held accountable.

They are victims too, and Wednesday was no victory for them, but a profound defeat. They will not get what they want, and they must not get what they want. They came out into the open way too soon, and they will pay for it.

The millions of people who supported Trump but did not attack the capitol need to be listened to and heard; something President-elect Biden seems to grasp.

The people who caused so much death and damage should, of course, be arrested and punished.

They are not getting the hero’s welcome they anticipated. There are hard and disappointing days ahead for many of them. That is a kind of justice.

All over the country, police agencies and private citizens are identifying the people in those photos.

But what about Trump? What is justice for him? Impeachment? Removal? Resignation?

It doesn’t make much sense, justice wise, to look the other way. In the Gulag Archipelago, Nobel Laureate Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn wrote this about evil and justice:

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

It seems to me that the foundations of justice have been ripped from right out under us by men and women who are, as they were in Berlin, silent about the evil we saw for much of the past for years.  We call them enablers. Some are calling them traitors.

That foundation has to be rebuilt slowly, mercifully, and with respect. Hardly any of us are blameless for what happened; so many of us, myself included,  contributed through our laziness, smugness, silence, or disinterest.

So what is justice here?

To me, it is forcing our President to resign from his office before he can do more damage or slide away from accountability and hide behind tomorrow’s lies. We are fickle people, we tend to forget.

And it isn’t time for another trial and congressional debate.

Failing Trump’s resignation, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are correct to impeach him for these crimes, and for officer Hickman and the others who died last Wednesday, and for the foundations of justice beneath the next generation.

At least history will remember what happened here, even if he is acquitted. Justice isn’t about certain success, it’s about right and wrong.

Rats and roaches live by competition and conflict under the laws of supply and demand,” wrote Wendell Berry. “It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

In 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to George Robertson of Lexington, Kentucky. “Our political problem now,” he wrote, is “Can we as a nation continue together permanently – forever half slave and half free?”

Our question is different but just as important. Our political problem now is can we, as a nation, continue together permanently – forever half truth and half lies.”

I mean to sign up in this struggle, I want to be a warrior for truth, seeking to practice honesty and generosity every day in every way. I can’t control what other people do, but I can control what I do.

Trump is already gone, in one way. Almost no honest or rational person can believe a word of what he says or justify what he has done. He is, as Don Corleone said, dead to me.

Gandhi said it is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts. There must be consequences for what he has done.

When we fail to set standards for justice and boundaries for behavior and hold people accountable, we feel angry and cheated and mistreated.

This is so often why we attack one another, which we are learning, is far more hurtful and dangerous than forcefully and bravely addressing a wrong.

 

One friend told me she needed Congress to prohibit Donald Trump from running again so she wouldn’t be frightened for the next four years.

This morning, I heard two members of a panel shout at an exhausted congressman being interviewed on an Albany radio station.

They overwhelmed the congressman with questions, they wanted to know at that very moment exactly what he and Congress would do to remove Trump from office by impeachment or the 25th amendment, and right now!

The congressman tried to plead for less politics and more communications, but he was shouted down,  talked over,  and refused to listen. I remembered why people hate the media.

But what struck me was how frightened the panel members were, it was clear in their shouting and voices, in their urgency.

The attack on the capitol on Tuesday has triggered yet another round of fear and even panic about Trump’s plans and the damage he could cause over the next two weeks. Liberals don’t spend much time celebrating their victories, they are masters of finding defeat in victory.

And I have learned this year that progressives are almost always frightened, it doesn’t always have much to do with what is really happening.

On my blog today, or on that radio show, barely anyone mentioned Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia, which will give Democrats control of the Senate and offer the change for real change in America.

Wasn’t that what we all were fighting for?

The people who love Trump are bonkers, and so are many of the people who hate him – he has a gift for that.

It’s important to cool down a bit and consider what it is he really can do in his remaining days and what he won’t do. There are a lot of clues and guides.

He has given us a rich and predictable track record.

First off, President Trump will not be impeached, declared unfit by his cabinet, or otherwise removed from office until January 20, when the Constitution says Joe Biden must take over. That is when Trump will leave or already be gone.

For one thing, Congress can’t move quickly enough to prepare for and investigate and launch an impeachment proceeding. There isn’t the time or the will.

Nor is there sufficient support from the Republican Party or Trump’s cabinet to support removing him under the 25th amendment.

It just isn’t going to happen. Move on.

Nearly being held hostage by a rampaging mob shook up a few Republican senators and Congress members and awoke some consciences. They’ll get over it, they are career politicians.

Still, most of the Republicans in Congress voted to support his claim that there was widespread fraud in the November election. Does anyone really think they will support tossing him out of office now?

Truth is truth, and facts are facts, Trump is falling apart and isolating himself, but he is still beloved and supported by many people, including many elected representatives in Congress.

The country is very much divided, and that will require lots of thought and attention. Running Trump off is not a good start, no matter how outrageous Wednesday was.

It makes sense to think about things that have happened and might realistically happen, rather than things that fuel fear and confusion.

It would also be helpful during this unprecedented and unsettling time to consider facts and, as Sherlock Holmes always said, what is probable is likely to be true.

Donald Trump will not seek re-election in 2024. His base remains supportive, but he has seriously damaged his brand and standing with his open support of the mob that attacked the capitol.

Beyond that, a new generation of mini-me Trumps – creepy and very ambitious Senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, and more serious established Republican figures like Vice President Pence, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Senators Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, and Rick Scott are already raising money and sizing up campaign staff.

Many of those people have already broken with Trump and would have no compunctions about challenging him. He doesn’t have a record to defend, unlike in 2016. The people tossed him out once, they would do it again.

In recent weeks, we have seen mounting evidence of his growing mental imbalance.

Also, Trump will be four years older, and unlike Joe Biden, the inside of his head is not calm and focused.

I believe he will continue to deteriorate, which is what almost every shrink who writes about it has written. He has to adjust to a host of investigations, lawsuits, and the life of a defeated loser stuck in Palm Beach, Florida, in a prison of an old mansion.

If his health holds, he’ll be around, but you won’t see him in the White House. Trump pretended to be a great president and wants to be called a great President. But his record makes clear that he doesn’t actually want to be a great president.

Trump will not start a nuclear war or be permitted to start a nuclear war, invade a foreign country, or otherwise seize control of the government. He has never been inclined to start wars; perhaps his greatest achievement has been to stop the endless wars that the United States has been conducting for a good chunk of my lifetime. He is all about isolating America, not expanding it.

Beyond that, the idea that he could blow up the world is an irresponsible myth, promoted by hysterics to people who promote hysteria.

Every Washington reporter – I was one – knows that whenever there is any question about a President’s motives or stability, the Pentagon puts procedures in place to block impulsive or extreme and unbalanced moves by a disturbed President.

This is practiced in drills even when the President is sane; they are certainly talking about it right now. If Trump decided to invade a foreign country or launch a nuclear weapon, other government officials would instantly be notified.

Generals also have the legal authority to refuse to carry out orders they believe are illegal or wildly irresponsible. The idea that some officer in a mountain cave would just hit a button and blow up the world is a Hollywood myth.

There is also no evidence of any kind that would support the idea that Trump is pathologically dangerous in that way. He has never moved towards genocide or mass arrests, concentration camps or murder squads, the favorite policy of the truly dangerous.

Trump is transactional, and almost certainly, a sociopath; he is not homicidal.

And he never does anything that will burnish the narrative he has created for himself, in this case, someone who has halted our endless wars, kept the “generals” at bay and saved the lives of generals and soldiers.

Yes, he will authorize the killing of a “terrorist” enemy when he can, that fits his narrative. He is also well known to be a coward as well as a germaphobe. Ending Western civilization would terrify him even more than he is terrifying others.

There are two excellent sources on Trump’s state of mind and capabilities. The best is perhaps from his niece, Mary Trump, who explained in her remarkable book Too Much And Never Enough why Trump didn’t even try to manage the coronavirus or address the civil unrest following George Lloyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police.

Either one of those things would have been simple to talk about, and almost guaranteed his re-election. He didn’t bother to do either one.

In fact, he doesn’t address much of anything but his own image and sense of self and needs for attention and approval. A war is way above his ability; using Twitter to fire up a mob of white nationalist supporters is simple for him – he can do it all in tweets and doesn’t have to leave his bedroom.

His Twitter and Facebook accounts have been blocked, he can certainly cause trouble, but he always – always – telegraphs what he is doing. And the generals at the Pentagon hate him as much as he hates them.

The attack on the capitol should not have been a surprise to anybody. He talked about bringing his most violent and disconnected followers to Washington to block the congressional election certification for months now.

The capitol police are about the only people in Washington who missed it.

Taking their guns and flats to the U.S. Capitol and raiding Nancy Pelosi’s office was about as close to heaven as these people will ever get. Trump paved the way and made them happy.

Instead of managing coups or complex government actions like combat, and in the face of the worst loss of his lifetime, he withdraws to his comfort zones – Twitter, of course, and Fox News and several new cable channels who share and embrace his lies and conspiracy theories.

He can watch stories about himself all day and apparently does.

He rants about others, celebrates almost anyone who supports him, lies and relays false narratives again and again, and rages about the weakness of others even while demonstrating his own.

He can never, says Mary Trump, escape the fact that he is a terrified little boy. Terrified little boys do not start wars; they prey on the vulnerable and the weak-minded and hide most of the time.

The Pentagon Generals are watching Trump like a hawk; no missiles are going anywhere without phone calls to Mike Pence and other key government officials, including the Speaker Of  The House and congressional leaders.

For him, there is never any other options than being positive and praising himself, projecting strength and brilliance, no matter how false, and refusing responsibility for any mistakes or wrongdoing.

Nothing else matters, nobody else matters.

When his gang of Proudboys and devoted followers stormed the capitol, Congress took it personally. Suddenly, the lies came home to roost.

He doesn’t seem to care, but it was yet another dreadful mistake in a year full of them. if you believe he cares about what we think of him.

He doesn’t. He cares what they think of him, and they love him to death.

Mary Trump reminds us – we’ve seen the truth of it – that Donald Trump is not capable of organizing anything more complicated than a tweet or interview with a friendly reporter or cable channel.

He makes noise, frightens people, bullies them, seduces them with his certainty and entertaining skills, which many people confuse with strength. He is not strong.

He fails at just about everything he does but draw attention.

Donald Trump will leave Washington on January 19, pouting off to his castle. I am certain he will be happy to go.

He may make a lot of noise from there and cause a lot of trouble. But the Republic will still stand; it turns out that our democracy is a lot stronger than we thought it was, and then he thought it was. It turns out that we are willing to fight for it once we are awakened.

We are awake.

Beyond Mary Trump, the second-best source of understanding about what Donald Trump will or won’t do and can or can’t do is a fascinating book entitled The Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists, and Mental Health Experts Assess A President, a collection assembled by Dr. Bandy Lee of Yale University.

The book is essentially an effort to warn the country that anyone as mentally unstable as Donald Trump should not be entrusted with the presidency’s life and death powers.

Trump has proven that there are many mentally unstable people in contemporary America, and they have found one another and rejoiced in having someone who speaks their language and vice versa.

But there is a difference between being mentally unstable and dangerous on a global scale. Trump pulled off a horrifying assault on his perceived enemies this week, but it was not on the scale of 911; it was not planned as well, not as murderous – no legislator died or was injured or held hostage – and not nearly as effective.

Washington is being transformed into a fortress; it will not happen there again anytime soon.

Communities across the country have been alerted to the danger, Trump’s primary communications tool has been taken from him. He seems to have neither the will nor energy to do worse in the short time remaining. He is under the biggest microscope in the world, everybody knows it when he turns on the TV or gets his hairpiece fluffed up.

Nor does he have a genuine motive. The election drama is over; there is no time or the means to create another similar situation. And he got what he wanted. To 40 percent of the country, he is not a loser but a victim.

Nor will the people around him permit him to do much damage without screaming for help and shouting out warnings. Trump’s world is one leaking sieve as he weakens and falls. And prepares to leave.

In his chapter of the book, Dr. James Gilligan points out that Trump’s real issue is not whether or not he is mentally ill – he clearly is. The issue is whether he is dangerous on the scale many people fear.

“Dangerous is not a psychiatric diagnosis,” writes Gilligan. “One does not have to be “mentally ill” as both law and psychiatry define it, to be dangerous. In fact, most mentally ill people do not commit serious violence, and most violence is committed by people who are not mentally ill.”

For decades now, America has been at war, killing many more people than Donald Trump has ever dreamt of killing. This is a function of power, money, and policy, not mental health, although some would argue with me about that.

The association between mental illness and violence is tenuous, says Dr. Gilligan. He points out that only 1 percent of the perpetrators of homicide in this country are found to be “not guilty because of insanity.”

The rest are judged by the courts and society to be mentally healthy but evil.

Sometimes, a person’s dangerousness is so obvious that one doesn’t need a shrink to spot it. Trump’s “dangerous” is right out in the open; he brags about it and displays it almost every time he opens his mouth.

In Trump’s case, we have thousands of public records, books, interviews, tape recordings videotapes, and his own public speeches, plus countless “tweets” of his numerous threats of violence, incitements to violence, and boasts of violence that he himself acknowledges having committed repeatedly and relentlessly.

I’ve read many of them this year.

The capitol’s attack illustrates how Trump is dangerous – punishing anyone who believes he is disloyal, the mark of the sociopath and inciting other people to do his dirty work.

The most revealing moment of the capitol assault was Trump’s urging his amped-up followers at a rally to get over to the capital and shake things up.

He indicated that he was going, but he never showed up. He never even tried to hide what he was doing and even blew the rioters a kiss of love as they raged through the capitol.

Hitler would have been at the front of the march up Pennsylvania Avenue and happily gone to jail.

Thanks, love ya, maybe you ought to go home now, and thanks for coming by.

According to his aides, Trump went to the White House, not the capitol, and retreated to his bedroom, watching happily as people fought for him and went after his enemies.

His cowardice surfaced Thursday afternoon. As talk intensified about removing him from office, Trump suddenly published a video that sounded like a real President, which is how we know he didn’t write it but had it shoved down his throat.

In the two-and-a-half-minute video, he called for tempers to cool (after heating them up for months), acknowledged there would be a new administration on January 20, and promised to focus on a “smooth, orderly, seamless transition of power.”

He also said serving as “your president” has been the honor of his lifetime.” I am actually sorry that he refused to be my president, or acknowledged people like me in any way.

So we know he got scared at the outrage surfacing all around him, and all over the world.

He watched cheerfully and approvingly for hours as his storm troopers terrorized the people he believed had failed to protect him, who were not 100 percent loyal, and who would not overturn the election so he wouldn’t be a loser.

I’ve been reading about Donald Trump for months now; stacks of books about him surround my desk. I am no psychic, but I have a pretty good bead on him. I’m proud of this work; it was helpful to me and perhaps to others.

It is so much better for me to understand someone than to hate them. And I love taking on challenging tasks.

Trump isn’t really that complex, and he always responds to the same things in the same way, another sign of the deeply disturbed sociopath. In his New York iteration, he was lighter and had more fun.

He wasn’t taken seriously, although he was probably seething about that.

One trait of sociopaths is that the more power they gain, the more troubled, and thus the more dangerous they become. When he won the presidency, he went over to the dark side, and that side just keeps getting darker, say the shrinks. But this might make him less, not more dangerous.

He doesn’t seem to be gaining strength to me. He is almost incoherent now.

But what people miss about Trump is that what bothered him so much wasn’t that he lost the election – he obviously hates the job and doesn’t even pretend to do it – it was the appearance of losing.

Not being seen as a loser seems to drive much of his life.

For two months now, actually longer, he almost daily warned that if he lost the election, it would be because it was rigged and was stolen.

Using every one of a President’s powerful communications skills – he is the first President to grasp the power of TV and social media  – he prepared his followers to believe the election was fraudulent if he lost and that it was stolen from him and them.

Anyone who was surprised by Wednesday’s assault on the heart of our democracy was just not paying attention.

Thus, even in defeat, his followers could still connect to him, follow him, share their sense of grievance and loss with him, if not even deepen it.

Trump succeeded. It worked.

Almost all of his followers accept and believe the election was rigged. Their support for him was never fact-driven, any more than a teenage girl’s love of Justin Bieber was anything but sensual or emotional.

It’s really the same thing, expressed in different ways for different people. If you look closely,  you can see the sensuality at Trump’s rallies. He is adored, not simply followed. He and his followers are always making love to one another, even as their testosterone almost pours out of their eyeballs.

Trump doesn’t need to attack Iran or blow up the world. In his mind, he won, he pulled it off. They got in the capitol. They were luckier than they imagined, busting into the building like that, stealing momentoes, peeing on the floor, overwhelming the stunned police.

Trump can and will say to the end of his days that he is not a loser, and millions of people will back him up. They showed everybody that they won’t take it lying down, even if they have no idea what it is.

Trump got even with the many disloyal people who refused to go all the way with him and scared the wits out of the country.  He wiped many of the few friendships he had in Washington. But sociopaths can’t make friends is the problem.

No one seems inclined to punish him or even banish him for his now treasonous crimes. No politician in history has been more rationalized and excused than our President.

A war would not be better than the assault on the capitol.

Trump got everything he wanted out of it.  Now that he isn’t a loser, he can and will now turn his attention over to his grand and dramatic departure – it will be spectacular in one way or the other – and retreat to Mar-a-Largo with 300 million dollars in the bank, his showcase wife and loyal followers all over the country begging him to come and rally with them.

Who needs a nuclear war?

I would encourage the twitchy and fragile progressives and liberals he has traumatized to consider this: Donald Trump has been defeated and failed in every possible way for the past four years and most dramatically in the past year.

He shines when it comes to seducing people and scaring everybody else.

He blew a sure-fire election, blew handling a pandemic, blew handling a troubled economy, blew dealing with racial tension, blew saving his party’s control of the Senate, blew overturning the presidential election, never got Mexico to pay for his wall, never got an infrastructure bill through Congress, never got even with Facebook and Twitter for blocking him, and never even made sure those Confederate flags keep flying over military bases.

Truthfully, he really doesn’t care about those things.

They are all just different ways of summoning the Proud Boys – they exist in many incarnations all over the country – to come to Washington and terrorize the people he has always hated and had nothing but contempt for.

This is the thing about crazy people. I know.

They don’t think the way we do, victories to us often defeat to them, and vice versa. They don’t see the world the way we do. I don’t believe Trump can stay healthy for very long, his fuses just burns too hot and too bright.

Whatever his destiny, it is not being the President of the United States. The circus isn’t going away, but it is going. If you believe in a liberal democracy, as I do, there is more to cheer than worry about.

The capitol will be fine, despite those sad and tragic deaths. Biden will take office; the big news for people who want a kinder country was the Georgia election, not Trump.

For the first time in years, it might be possible to help save the earth, support voting rights, bring health care to the people who need it,  feed the hungry, ease the suffering of the refugees,  and bring competent and honest people back into government.

There is a lot of good stuff to worry about. I’m not spending the year fearing Trump, much as I will miss him.

I will, God forgive me. He helped me find my better angel. We’ve gotten close, in some bizarre  but important ways.