Here’s a burst of truth I can offer you that the other pundits will not share with you:

Donald Trump has a bigger problem than Hillary Clinton. He is boring.  He is putting people to sleep all over the country. I think of a crazy old uncle, bitter and whiny,  raging on endlessly about all the people who screwed him in life. It is tiresome.

And I have a confession which I will make up front: I hate whiners and I hate whining I am immoveable on the subject.

When my daughter Emma was three, I told her she could have anything within reason that she wanted, provided she never whined. And I got her everything within reason that she wanted.

And she has never whined to this day.

Mr. Trump whines every single day, and I am bored with him.

What does it mean to be boring: according to the dictionary, it means being monotonous, tedious, irksome, tiresome. It means being Donald Trump.

He’s got the media all wrong. Their ideology is money, not politics, but he knows that of course.

It isn’t that the media is biased, they will put a cockroach  on the air all day if it draws ratings and profits and screams loud enough  – just look at this campaign. But they are missing the big story. Donald Trump is not undermining our democracy, he is putting it to sleep.

The candidate whose face and image has become all-encompassing on media, has become boring, and if they don’t know it today, they will know it soon enough, when their ratings come in. The marketers know it already. You can be a lot of awful things in America and do very well, Mr. Trump has proven that, but you can not be boring and do very well.

This week, I have moved on, and about time. Life is way too precious to listen to this stuff every day. I am old enough, I can’t waste any more hours or days on it.

In America, marketing is a religion, billions and billions of dollars depend on market research. Two days ago, I went on B&H Photo to look at the price of a portrait lens, I was just browsing, and since then there hasn’t been a five minute period when an image of the lens didn’t pop up on some website or in some e-mail or Facebook post. They know what all of us are thinking and wanting and liking, it is a science, not a guess.

The marketers have known for months that Donald Trump will lose, and have known for weeks something I just figured out recently: he has become profoundly boring. Some people are screaming and railing at his rallies, but much greater numbers of people, myself included, are falling asleep when he talks and shouts and reaching for a good book or some music.

Listening to Trump rant on every day about the end of the world and all the many conspiracies against him is about as inspiring as putting a tin can on your head and banging it with a hammer for hours. I mean, there are just a lot of wonderful things to be doing in life, this is not one of them.

For awhile, I was fascinated by Trump, and so was everyone else. He was very different, a celebrity with an aura of success and a kind of 50’s idea of glamour hovering about. He has a gift for communicating with the outraged. I remember staying in one of his hotels on a book tour and staring at the gold-place faucets in the bathroom, I thought I was in France just before the Revolution.

it was simply beyond my grasp that someone like him could get nominated for President by a major political party, he lied and strutted and insulted and bullied and improvised, usually all at once in a sort of stream of conscientious. He was crude and always seem to have disturbing issues with women, he seemed piggish to me, sometimes disgusting.

The people who love him because he is not a politician are correct. He isn’t. I used to cover politics, and my own hubris required that I understand what seemed, on the surface, to be incomprehensible.

I got momentarily hooked on Trump, like so many people, I had never seen anything like him, and eventually, like so many people, I was  horrified, which, as we know, is also addicting. I was also frightened for my country, which I love.

I was one of the people driving news websites to unprecedented ratings and tons of profit. They do not ever want the campaign to end, and will pretend to the last-minute that the apocalypse is upon us and that Trump, like Godzilla, can rise up out of the muck at any time.

I wrote several months ago that I believed the campaign was over, and that he would lose, but I had no idea just how over it was going to be. And is.

I never imagined a tape out there where he would brag about “grabbing pussy.” Today, The Upshot, for my money the most reliable political projection and polling site in the world, said Donald  Trump’s chance of becoming president, with just a few weeks to go, is now down to 8 per cent, the lowest they have ever been, and the lowest of any presidential candidate in modern history.

Those are not the numbers of a charismatic, ascending political leader.

This morning, it was reported that Young and Rubicam, the giant marketing firm that has tracked Donald Trump’s consumer brand for many years through surveys and market research, says the public is no longer intrigued by him, his ideas, or his products, hotels, or golf courses. A candidate who has depended solely on personality to propel him is no longer seen as likeable, interesting or glamorous.

In recent weeks, the number of consumers who say Trump is distinct has fallen by 10 per cent, according to their highly respected survey, which corporations pay a lot of money to see. Those who think he is fun have dropped 13 per cent. Trendy: down 17 per cent. Stylish, down 21 per cent.

“Trump,” says the latest Young and Rubicam (these are surveyors who would push a gila monster if his numbers were up, they don’t care who runs for president if he or she can sell) “is becoming boring even to Republicans, but his worst performance is among those who identify as political independents  (that’s me) or members of smaller political parties. Among those folks, who could be considered swing voters, Trump is 17 per cent less fun, a whopping 37 per cent less dynamic and 30.6 percent less distinctive than he was just 90 days ago.

In politics, they call that “free fall.”

This report is highly relevant to me and my life. A few days ago, I browsed the news on my Iphone 7 Plus, my gateway to life beyond the farm, and I saw Donald Trump at a rally looking just like my deranged old Uncle Sam, waving his arms and fingers around, sniffing and spitting and scowling and ranting and whining about how everyone in the world was out to get him, or had screwed him in one way or another.

I was becoming bored, and profoundly so. How often can anybody listen to this?

Donald Trump had become my own worst fears about myself as I turn 69, that I would become some cranky and nasty old man ranting about the world and the good old days, and young people today, and African-Americans and  women and immigrants and crooked politicians ruining my life, causing my book sales to drop and my royalties to vanish and excusing my misdeeds and failures by saying other people were all doing worse things than I did.

In the past few days, I have picked up on my book reading, I have downloaded the new Nora Jones CD and listened to Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks to honor his Nobel Prize. My music listening and book reading had declined during my pre-bored fascination with Donald Trump, I counted about 25 times I checked my Iphone for the news one day and awakened to the fact that Mr. Trump was no longer interesting to me.

Wow, it is so much nicer listening to Norah Jones than Donald Trump, it is hard to believe both people exist in the same universe.

Mr. Trump just keeps shouting the same things every day, the only thing new was the target list. Lately, he began trying to eat his own, and it occurred to me this was getting very, very old.

I am very sorry for the many good people who have chosen to put their faith in this dysfunctional and aspiritual human being, they have just permitted themselves to be betrayed one more time, by one of the biggest hucksters of all time. They will perhaps one day be grateful that they were spared the  ultimate betrayal, his becoming the leader of what is called the Free World.

Donald Trump is not only boring, he isn’t even original. Mencken wrote about him a half century ago in his classic, Notes On Democracy.

Of all the emotions related to the emergence of Democracy, wrote Mencken, “fear remains the chiefest among them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos…The whole history of the country has been history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, Pancho Villa, German spies, the Kaiser, Bolshevism.”

And Mexicans, Immigrants, journalists, Clintons.

The demagogue himself, writes Mencken, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman,
usually comes ignominiously to grief when he actually has to propose a program beyond fear and the easy manipulation of the mob.

Sound familiar? We have seen worse than Trump and survived them. We have been there before.

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People  have to make up their own minds and follow their own beliefs. I don’t tell others what to do or think.

As for me, I feel liberated by the revelation that Donald  Trump is not only a boor, he is a bore. I know every single thing he is going to say before he says it, and only the names change. It is no longer fascinating, there is no longer anything to divine or observe. I will learn nothing by observing him.

If I were to meet him, I would tell him I would happily listen to his ideas and programs if he would promise to stop whining, just for a day. Alas, that will not happen. He has nothing to say, his whole program is one continuous whine.

I’ll skip the debate Wednesday night and get back to the fundamentals of my life that have done so much good for me – walking in the woods with Maria, making love whenever possible, reading my good novels and books, plugging my headphones into the Iphone for an evening music hour, meditating in the back pasture with the donkeys, working on my next book, meditating, doing therapy work with Red,  taking photos for the blog.

Donald Trump is over for me, and not in the way I always thought.

He isn’t going with a bang, but a whine. Not only is he certain to lose the election, the marketers have pronounced him beyond dead, he is worse than that, he is now boring. Angry old men in America cannot be boring and nasty every single day, week after week, and sell whatever it is they are pitching. That is not how marketing works, not in commerce, not in politics.

As for the good people who e-mail me almost every day wringing their hands about this disturbing wreck of a man, I hope they will check out Young and Rubicam’s marketing study. Back to the fundamentals of life.

Move on, nothing to see here.