I wrote a couple of days ago that I was temporarily ending my self-imposed exile from political writing – I was a political writer before I started writing books and migrated to the county – but that the current presidential election had brought me back to it, hopefully briefly.

Every political reporter knows this campaign is over, and so does every experienced political consultant. One, a good friend of mine, we used to work together in newspapers, messaged me last week. He said the data is clear, the election is over. “It may well be a landslide.”

Politics is never fully predictable and there is always some chance Trump could pull off a miracle. It is less likely every day, especially given his increasingly erratic and disturbing behavior.

I wanted to write about this because so many people are so worried about this election, I wanted to ease their worry. I am not worried about it, and I think a lot of good will come from it.

The piece I wrote went viral, it may be the most shared piece I have ever written, you can see it here.

I have a foot in both worlds, really. as a book author and former journalist and media critic,  I understand how media has worked, as a user and early enthusiast about new information technology, I also grasp the power of social media to affect change. It is easy to misinterpret the power of social media, even easier to overrate its influence. That is happening in the political coverage now.

It was eerie, but the minute I wrote the piece, a raft of new polls came out  almost immediately showing Hilary Clinton beginning to break away from Trump in ways that are now almost impossible for him to overcome in a couple of months, especially as he seems utterly committed to alienating and confusing the greatest number of people every single day.

I felt good about my post.

I want to write today about the underlying truth of where we are now:   social media has played a key role in this campaign, both in elevating Trump and in the spectacular disintegration of his candidacy.

Today, and especially since his insanely stupid confrontation with the Khan family, and his bumbling through everything else,  following the Trump campaign is more like watching the Hindenburg catch fire and crash.

The political history of social media is that it is a powerful medium for starting revolutions, a poor one for keeping them going or making them succeed. Consider the collapse of the Arab Spring, the great democratic experiment in the  Middle East. Social media awakened fierce social protests and even toppled governments,  but could not make them viable or enduring. Democracy did not come to the demonstrators.

Evil people can get on Facebook and Twitter too, and use them effectively.

Both journalism and politics have been traumatized by social media. Both are essentially closed, elitist institutions whose success depends on the exclusive control of information and political power.  Presidents get nominated by a very small number of very entitled people. It is, as Trump suggests, a closed shop. Until the Internet, so was media.

The idea of so many millions of people communicating to one another directly would have made Jefferson happy, but has terrified both politics and publishers. If the people get hold of the tools of information, there is not much for them to do, not much money for them to make.

Trump is the first national political figure to grasp the possibilities of using a platform like Twitter to quickly reach a like-minded audience and bypass the entrenched institutions of information and politics. In this case, working class white men who feel they have been left behind, especially in the face of liberation movements for women, African-Americans, Latino’s and gay and transgender people.

Trump got the big and uncovered story of working-class America: they have felt and been betrayed by Washington economists and politicians, who promised them they would flourish in the new global economy. They have not, their work, lives and communities have been shattered and abandoned, and no one has lifted a finger or spent a dollar to help them.

Both parties completely missed the rage and hurt that was building. Hillary Clinton certainly didn’t talk about it much, and neither did any of Donald Trump’s 16 fellow candidates for President. Trump broke the story on Twitter, and it was an instant sensation there and in almost every primary state.

Trump, a billionaire who seems somewhat oddly to share this working class anger and sense of grievance, was able to completely by pass the networks and big newspapers and the Republican political establishment. They all thought he was a joke who would fade.

But Trump had reached his own natural audience and was also able to attract millions of disaffected people from outside of the political system who felt the country had forgotten and abandoned them. They will stay loyal to him in the end for that, but there are not nearly enough of them to win a presidential election.

In terms of launching his campaign, his Twitter initiative was stunningly effective, his more traditional opponents were steamrolled by his ability to hold a running conversation – he posts on Twitter almost every day, sometimes several times a day. It was their turn to be left behind

In a primary, this worked beautifully. People sent him money, came to his rallies, voted for him.  He didn’t have to speak to the broader audience or win them over to win.

On social media there is a curious phenomenon whereby people attach strongly to people who talk directly to them, and do so regularly.  Most people don’t get to chat with powerful leaders every day, Trump is viscerally interactive. It is quite easy to build a large following on Twitter, tens of thousands of people have large followings there, it doesn’t necessarily mean a thing in relation to the larger world.

Lots of authors have Twitter Feeds, but they will almost all tell you that they don’t sell any books. One thing does not necessarily follow the other.

If Twitter sparked his early success, it also doomed  him, he could never see beyond this superficial and juvenile adolescent way of communicating. There is, in fact, something of the arrested adolescent in Trump, he does not seem to have grown up, for all his success.

Trump, among his other problems, got caught up in the echo chamber of the Twittersphere, he came to see it as the real world, as the entire political reality. He was so busy pandering to his 10.5 million Twitter followers he forget to speak to anyone else. This worked in the primaries,  general elections are a very different story.

The media loves to quote Twitter and Facebook as if both speak for the entire country and are extraordinarily powerful. They aren’t.  Twitter has 7 million users, or about 17 per cent of the U.S population of nearly 324 million people.  (About 53 per cent of Americans are on Facebook, but Facebook does not play nearly so large a perceived role in the media/political world). That means Trump was not speaking directly to more than 83 per cent of Americans, most of whom do not spend their days and nights on Twitter, they are busy working or taking care of their families.

Twitter is important, but it is not nearly as powerful as Trump believes, or as the tech-traumatized media likes to think. In fact, one could argue that the media and political obsession with Twitter – they are all on it – has blinded them to seeing what is happening the wider world.

The great reporters once got their insights by traveling around talking to human beings, not by monitoring Twitter feeds and screaming at one another on cable television. We see the consequences of this every day. The great political writers – David Broder, James Reston, Eugene Roberts – used to get it right, not wrong. They were rarely shocked by the mood of the people, mostly because they spent most of their time traveling and talking to them, not sitting in studios tweeting.

It is a shock both to journalism and politics that tens of millions of Americans, devastated by national economic policies are furious and disconnected. It is not a surprise to me, if you go to Stewart’s, a regional convenience store chain in my town where people gather for their morning coffee, you will hear about it every day.

My town has never seen a reporter. No one talks to real people any longer. Trump speaks directly to them.

No one predicted Trump’s rise, no one foresaw his fall. Journalism is no longer able to guide us or help us understand what it is really happening.

In this new political environment, we are on our own, your idea is every bit as good as theirs or mine. But the Trump campaign is also frightening, it has greatly disturbed many people.

Trump failed to evolve, the danger of an egomaniac billionaire running his own show.

The nominating conventions are the first time most people get to see the candidates and form enduring impressions of them, and these impressions rarely change much after the conventions. In recent years, the country has broken into rigid ideological constructs – the dread left and right – which means even fewer people will change their minds about anything, no matter what is said. The middle is shrinking.

No presidential candidate in the history of the country has ever lost with the lead Hilary Clinton now has over Donald Trump.

Hilary Clinton’s staff understood this profoundly important reality, Donald Trump did not. He was and is mired in his own Twitter World, it became reality for him. He seems not able to believe that it is time for him to move on. He appears now to be addicted to it.

Feedback on social media can be intoxicating, it is easy to feel like the Pope waving from his balcony.

The political reality is that Trump’s supporters will mostly support him no matter what he does, and the same is true for Clinton. To win, he has to win over hers and those who are undecided. She has to keep hers, she doesn’t need his to win.  He didn’t. She did.

Trump is far more provocative, insulting and, frankly, foolish in his political judgments than Clinton or her handlers have  been, and a week after the conventions, a significant majority of Americans are now more comfortable with her than they were, and less comfortable with him. People did not go for his Transylvanian view of America.

If Clinton makes strangely unaccountable blunders at times in her life, her campaign has been almost flawlessly run. Her campaign also speaks directly to voters, but not via angry Twitter feeds. She has stayed focused and avoided a single major error while campaigning. She is the anti-Trump.

She might be unpopular, but she is not scaring people or attacking Gold Star Mothers.

Trump is already whining about the election being rigged, a certain sign that he is floundering. You don’t claim something is rigged if you are winning.

The conventions proved a striking contrast between the two and the millions of voters who have now made up their minds, and whom Trump has almost willfully alienated. It is possible that the televised debates – if they occur – can change that equation, but Hilary Clinton is far less likely to mess up in a debate than Trump, he is much more likely to implode, which he has been doing nearly every day.

The debates are  not likely to be transformative, even if they do occur. Trump may skip at least some of the debates altogether, he is already claiming that they are rigged.

When the history of this campaign is written, Khizr Khan will be at the center.

Khizr Khan changed the equation further. He is not a political person, despite many efforts to label him that way, he is the most American of figures, a patriotic immigrant who son sacrificed himself for the country. And whose parents are in awful grief.

Of all of the people we have seen in the political spectrum, Donald Trump is perhaps the only one who could not find it in himself to be gracious or empathetic to this noble and pained man. Beyond that, he managed – on Twitter – to be cruel to the Khan and his wife, for absolutely no reason. This is the stuff of mindless Twitter posts, not of the real world of human beings. Trump lost it there, if not there, it would likely have been somewhere else.

In the same way that Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welsh exposed Joseph McCarthy as a liar and a cruel and indecent fool, Khan exposed Trump as a man trapped in  his own universe, no longer able to judge his new and broader audience. Trump revealed a cruelty, arrogance and insensitivity that was simply unacceptable to the very audience he most need to win over – the people who are not angry, not always left behind, not disaffected, not on Twitter.

His Twitter jibes at Khan excited his followers and repelled just about everyone else. Trump now had a tin Twitter ear.

These were also the very people Clinton needed to reach – remember the two were tied after the Republican convention. The new polls suggest a dramatic, even massive shift to Hilary Clinton. Trump blew it, even as he fumed and whined and sputtered out more insulting Tweets and continued to attack the Khan family.

Twitter is a valuable tool, it is not the place to offer a vision of the country or a political campaign. It is good for provoking and declaring, not for explaining complex ideas and policies.

The language of Twitter – the abbreviated jabs and bursts that are Trump’s hallmark, do not translate well to many people, including the vast majority of the country who do not Tweet.

Trump became addicted to his own Twitter rants and the endless publicity a feckless media bestowed upon them, as if they were the very pronouncements of Socrates. They did not know better.

The people running Hillary Clinton’s campaign did know better. You do not see her trying to define herself via Twitter outbursts, it it is not the way most people see their presidents communicating. There are so many much better ways to do it.

Clinton has not even bothered to defend herself against the avalanche of accusations Trump has thrown towards her, she is the steady ship, chugging along. All she has to do to look good against Trump’s increasingly frantic and desperate rantings is nothing. She can let him destroy his own campaign, he is happy to oblige. What a good position for her to be in, just weeks after she faced a threatening scandal at the worst possible time.

You could call Trump’s disintegration  death by Twitter, or at least that’s what I call it.

The campaign is really over now, for all practical purposes, not matter how much they try to frighten you. Of course, there is time for things to change, for new things to happen. There is growing talk in Washington that Trump may withdraw from the race, many Republicans are now convinced his campaign will be a catastrophe in November. I would tend to agree.

There is no evidence that Trump is a generous or selfless enough person to do that.  He seems to be loyal to no ideology or belief. Although he senses the suffering and pain of one group of people, it is not clear how he intends to help them, he is still all about himself.

There is also right now no evidence to suggest he can possibly win. My tweet: It’s over. Stop Worrying.