On a personal level, I feel Donald Trump has defeated me as well as himself. I prize empathy and compassion, I consider both the highest calling of a human being.

Empathy is not about caring about people I love – that’s easy. The real challenge is feeling empathy for people I don’t love or even like.

I’ve been working hard on shedding argument and anger, most of the time I am making headway.

I’m having trouble feeling compassion for Donald Trump right now, even though I can see every day how damaged and tormented this poor soul is.

We talk about getting a kinder country back, how can we do that if we can’t be kinder ourselves? Doesn’t this begin at home? Is it naive to hope for?

When I was a reporter, I once felt empathy for a likable serial killer, why can’t I feel any now for my President? He is as unhappy and wretched a human being as I can think of.

If we can’t empathize with something like that, what hope is there for us? Do we need to be Thomas Merton or the Dalai Lama?

Every time I write about Mr. Trump, which is often these days, I look to find some pity for this broken, self-pitying, and miserable man.

His niece Mary wrote in compelling detail in her new book about how difficult his childhood was, and how his father insisted on his son bringing out the worst parts of himself.

Sometimes I think being President is an absolute horror for him.

I do understand why so many people voted for him, I am struggling to understand how anyone, knowing what we now know, can still support him.

But I have to postpone pity and compassion, maybe later. There’s work to be done.

I see a man whose self-absorption and mean-spiritedness is tearing our country apart.  Donald Trump is absent of any moral instincts or sensibilities –  responsibility, courage, empathy, justice.

I can’t abide people like that. I just can’t find anything in this man to like, and watching him closely lately, I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone in more pain.

His happiest moments – those rallies – are his darkest.

Angry mobs shouting for blood, howling for jail for political opponents, offering cheers and adulation. I can’t help but think of Dracula feasting on blood.

I was a political writer, I loved politicians, very few of whom I agreed with about anything. I wasn’t always in sync with his politics, but I always liked Ronald Reagan.

Reagan had many enemies, but he insisted on a charitable view of his critics. Former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who worked for Reagan, remembers him admonishing his staff by telling them “Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents.”

In his farewell address, Regan offered an uplifting vision of America: “I’ve spoken of the shining city all of my political life, but I don’t know if I ever communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

I respected this gentle vision, it spoke of a decent, positive spirit who wanted people to feel good about their country, it might not have been workable for many Americans, but it was lovely in its own way, and people loved him for it.

I never imagined missing Reagan, he was so much more conservative than I was, and his refusal to even speak of the AIDS epidemic seemed especially heartless to me.

But last night, I decided to watch Mike Wallace’s interview with President Trump, and my heart sank.

I had just read a piece by Atlantic Magazine Contributing Editor Peter Wehner, who worked for Reagan and both Bushes, and is now Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, in Washington.

I am always taken aback at how dark Donald Trump’s idea of America is, this was a wantonly spoiled child after all, who bullied and bullshitted his way to the Presidency.

He seemed to have everything he wanted – a plane, a tower, mansions and women all over the place, fame and limousines, and a half dozen golf courses all his own. It did not make him happy.

The answer is out of Nietsche, it is dark and furious. And there is not a shred of happiness in it. I guess the people who know him were right. It is never good enough, it will never be good enough.

There is no joy in Donald Trump’s White House, or in his presidency.

He seems to see our country as a bloody, steaming cauldron, overrun by rapists, anarchists, and thieves.

In his piece, Wehner described Reagan as a man of personal decency, grace, and class, feelings that seem almost ancient today, and very much missed.

“He has since,” he wrote, “been replaced by the crudest and cruelest man ever to be president. One senses in Donald Trump,” he wrote, “no joy, no delight, no laughter. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.”

He is a damaged soul. And a sad one. This observation is not from a leftist radical, but a lifelong conservative and Republican.

I like reading Wehner’s work. I would never write to him to say I read him “even though I disagree with him,” and even though that is the truth.

I read him because he is thoughtful and insightful and honest, and that is enough for me. I don’t need to always agree with him, and I doubt he would want or need me too.

The need to always agree is a deadly pandemic all of its own, and just as dangerous in a democracy.

I have always been partial to the people in the true conservative movement, the ones Trump has driven out of the Republican Party. I always found people like Wehner open, respectful of our traditions, and articulate about their ideas.

They understood the system, they didn’t need to win every time, at all costs.

After I read his piece, I sat down to watch the Trump-Wallace interview, and like Wehner, I found it to be especially revealing and dispiriting. I got depressed just looking at it, and Maria will tell you I am not given to depression.

Like Reagan, I think I have an optimistic and open view of the world, I have not yet succumbed to the gloom and despair shrouding the country like a dark storm cloud.

But like Wehner, I felt saddened by Trump and his harsh, even brutal sense of his time in office. At first, watching him often made me angry – I really dislike liars, it’s in my DNA. But then, he just makes me sad.

To me, watching him is like watching a deer hit by a car, and flailing around in the road. I just pray for him or her to end their misery. I got that same feeling watching him squirm at Wallace’s questions.

It was hard to watch.

His remarks in the interview felt like a farewell speech to me and an especially dark one. But it could hardly have been more different than Ronald Reagan’s.

Wallace came at Trump with some hard questions, but the most revealing answer came in response to the easiest question he was asked, not the most difficult.

Wallace asked him what he thought about the first, perhaps last term of his presidency.

“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”

When Wallace, startled, asked him “what about the good parts, sir?,” it seemed there were none, only bitter grievances about hoaxes and investigations and Jeff Sessions and a long list of all of the people who should be in jail for investigating or criticizing him.

He said the people who treated him unfairly – there was quite a list – should be in jail for 50 years “right now.” Part of Trump’s mental disorder is being unable to let go of anything he perceives as disloyal or critical. I suffered from obsessions like that for a while.

Trump doesn’t seem to know how many Americans are sick and dying or care, but he remembers each and every person who he believes has wrong him or treated him “unfairly,” or in a criminal way.

I suffered from obsessive behavior when I cracked up.  I don’t wish that kind of obsession on anyone. It feels like your brain has been taken over by raging demons.

This is troubling for me.  I can’t remember people who insulted me in the morning, let alone years later. The most important spiritual work I’ve done has been learning to let go.

Once I fantasized about calling up Donald Trump and explaining how one learns to let go. Then I woke up.

His comments to Wallace felt like a bitter eulogy for himself and in some ways a heartbreaking one. The Presidency was the worst possible job for him to take, it has driven him over the edge.

That long list of people he wanted to jail was the only thing about his first term that he cared to say.

Wehner was shaken.

“Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man,” he wrote. “He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer – what good parts of your presidency would like to be remembered for? – triggered a gusher of discontent.”

I’ve worked hard and fought hard to understand why so many good people voted for Donald Trump, and I have always tried to defend them and explain them in my writing.

I believe in democracy and love my country, and have always rejected the Mencken idea  that as democracy was perfected, “the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be  adorned by a downright moron.”

I wouldn’t call Donald Trump a moron, but it would be hard to argue that he is the best person in American to be chosen to lead our country.

His election says a lot about us that we have never wanted to face.

We are in the worst mess of my lifetime, perhaps in all of our history.

Wehner, a gentle and thoughtful writer, wrote in his Atlantic piece that our President “not only nurses his grievances, but he also acts on them. He lives to exact revenge, to watch his opponents suffer, to inflict pain on those who don’t bend before him. Even former war heroes who have died can’t escape his wrath.”

I was always proud that many Trump supporters read my work and followed my blog and enjoyed my photos. I worked to make sure they were comfortable, and I assured my more skeptical readers that they were not bigots or racists or fools.

I still believe that. I’ve met too many Trump people to believe that.

Yet I’ve lost patience with the enabling of this immature and malignant man child. How can anyone who loves this country skip over his vengeance and racial hatred and grievance and selfishness?

By now, it is all too apparent what Donald Trump is, and the people who enable and support him so intensely – often as payback for the elitists and privileged who have tormented and mistreated them  – must see the racism and corruption and contempt for our freedoms that are so open and constant.

It must be okay for them. How do I deal with that? Are far-right judges more important than our country?

President Trump pulled off a miracle in 2016, how can it be that he has not one single fond or positive memory of this journey? Is it possible that his bitterness comes from his knowledge he will lose in November, perhaps he’s already seething about it?

But I can’t any longer defend or explain the people who can turn a blind eye to the damage he is doing to our country every day. We all need to be shaken up from time to time, but Donald Trump is killing our country to save himself.

His supporters don’t need me to speak for them, they will have to do it for themselves.

In another time, another circumstance, there would be space in my head to pity him, and to try to understand the people who are helping him take our country apart, piece by piece.

But this isn’t the time for me. This is the time to be strong and clear and resolute, like these mothers out in Portland, heading out to face the case and bullets every night.

For now, there are other things I can do and will do to help in my own small way to get this incomplete man removed from the presidency so we can begin the long and painful process of healing.

Perhaps I can do nothing more than help people understand the nightmare we are in. If I can do that, it will be something worthwhile to have done.

Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for much of his life – 27 years – but I never once heard or read of him speaking of his life in the self-pitying way the way President Trump whines and complains about being persecuted every day.

The first thing Mandela did when he was released was to call for forgiveness and reconciliation.  He was treated pretty unfairly as well. That was a man with a big and generous heart. Trump is a man with a small and damaged one.

Mandela will always be remembered for bringing his tormented country together.

Donald  Trump will be remembered for trying to tear his tormented country apart.

Mandela fought his enemies but forgave them and helped to heal his country rather than divide it. It can be done.

When all this fire and brimstone is over, I hope to get all of my heart back. It is something to look forward to.

“I am fundamentally an optimist,” Mandela wrote. “Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lies defeat and death.”