I’m not lying or playing Polyanna here, no games, no lies. Good and bad, like life and death, are all part of the same thing. The truly spiritual people know that everything is a gift.

Donald Trump is a gift.

I was a police reporter for a decade in Atlantic City, Washington, Philadelphia, and I know bad things happen to good people all the time.

God help me, I loved every murder, mob killing, and drunk that I saw.

I gave up writing about crimes when a good friend, a police sergeant, told me I was getting too comfortable seeing dead bodies. He was right, and soon after, he was one of them, shot to death during a traffic stop.

I loved the crime beat, but I loved covering politics even more.

I couldn’t tell you why I was given this gift of writing at this time, or why so many people have found me now and thanked me for it.

I am humbled; my head is turned; it feels like a rebirth to me, a calling. It is alway a gift to feel needed.

Sometimes, you just have to bow to the fates. My good friend Sue tells me that at moments like this, she remembers what her Aunt Louise taught her,  you simply have to lower  your eyes and say, “thank you, thank you.”

This is what I think now about the chilling decline of Donald Trump, always an unlikely President, now a broken and failed man, his flaws and delusions so naked, so exposed.

He was done in by a pandemic, not a politician. He really never knew what hit him.

Anyone who wishes to be human cannot help but feeling some pain and empathy for this man.

It’s hard enough to fail but to be stripped open in this way and publicly humiliated is awful to watch. Every time he opens his mouth now, or tweets some incoherent thought,  or interrupts a  questioner,  it is a punishment, not just a failure.

He’s lost the magic.

If we are human, and not robots, it hurts to see it.

Every day, our President pretends the virus isn’t real.

Every day, a thousand people die; everyday teachers and parents’ schools struggle to make decisions teachers and principals should never be asked to make.

Every day, our civic structure is strained and tested, hatred and argument and grievance blooms, as it always does when no one is in charge, and demagogues rise. Every day, conspiracy theorists and the ignorant, deny science and reality.

Every day the virus experts tell us our President is wrong and is lying, and he tells us they are pathetic and incompetent. Every day, people are getting evicted, sick, die, lost their jobs and benefits, unsure of how to feed themselves and their families.

Every day, businesses close and vanish. Every day, people flee from our cities, the economy crumbles.

Every day, he pretends these things aren’t true, he spits in our faces, and rolls over our traditions, protections, ethics, and shared understandings.

Every day, he worries and upsets and outrages and frightens us. What an unhealthy way to live, we humans are not built for it, it seems like it’s been going on for a lifetime.

I can feel the heat of this time, this election, coming through the windows when I get up in the morning. It’s in the air and the faces of everyone I see.

It takes a particular person to push away this fear, this sadness, this drumbeat of worry and argument and rage.

But we have to do it; we have to move forward, we have to find ways to stay grounded and calm and steady.

The challenge of our time is to be one of the special people, to be strong and clear. And calm.

My way – what has worked for me – is a combination of acceptance, living in the present, and understanding that challenge is always a gift, and Donald Trump is the gift to our Republic that we have sorely needed for a long time. Light and dark are two ends of the same thing.

His gifts to me have been great. I can only speak for me, I needed a kick in the ass.

He has inspired me to do good rather than argue about it. He has brought me into daily contact with the best and most loving humans I have ever known and never knew in my previous life.

He has turned me into a patriot, a fighter for freedom and compassion, an advocate for the poor and the needy. He did that; I didn’t do it before him.

He has brought me back into the refugee experience of my own family, my own life, my wonderful grandmother, who gave her life so that I could have mine.

And last but not least,  he brought me right here, writing this.

Sometimes we just do need a whuppin’ upside the head to awaken and be given the precious opportunity to work and fight for what we believe – a big gift.

How often does that happen in a lifetime?

In his twisted way, this has become Donald Trump’s mission in the 2020 election:  he is the Great Disrupter, all right, disrupting our complacency, laziness, and indifference.

He’s dusted off the cobwebs, broken the mirrors, pried open the dusty love of freedom and country, drawn so many of us together in ways we would never have experienced without him.

I’m sorry, for all the smoke and mirrors and fire, he is a gift, and that is the way to stay strong,  grounded, and useful at a time when almost everyone is in need.

And all of this gift-giving comes from a broken man at the center of power, determined to corrupt and abuse our way of life in every way he can.

How does one survive the 2020 election and turn it into a gift?

You have to think about it.

The President has always lied and dodged distorted facts, but in recent weeks he has become more shameless as he becomes more desperate and frightened.

He is learning an awful thing about truth, something every good priest and reporter knows:  truth is as straight as an arrow, a lie swivels and slides all over the place, and comes back to sting.

I won’t surrender my humanity to this election, like the angry people who message me every day. And I won’t live in fear of the future.

One can criticize him, fear him, even hate him. But the point is not to become him. Or to live in the awful grip of what might be.

No one knows what the future will be. No one imagined this time now.

I put myself in Donald Trump’s shoes right now. He seems frightened and bewildered to me, like someone who can’t believe what is happening to him.

I imagine him thinking that at any moment the world will right itself and he will return to the person he thinks he is but knows deep inside that he is not.

In desperation, he throws a million lies out into the wind,  hoping one of them will land and stick and change everything. But there are two many now,  are all coming back, swirling all over him. He seems out of time, out of sync, out of faith.

Everywhere he goes, people are confronting him, challenging him, correcting him, I imagine the inside of his head is like a blender filled with vegetables and fruit. Sometimes he seems to be pleading with interviews as if can cajole them to accept what he is saying.

There is nothing harder than keeping track of lies, I know, when I stopped telling them to myself, I felt as light as a robin way up a tree.

He isn’t just making people angry; he is frightening them now. He has brought a new dimension into the election for perhaps the first time in my life.

In his effort to cripple the U.S. Post Office, and his obsession with mail-in voting, and his suggestion that he can delay or altogether cancel a national election, and his assertion that he has the power to tell the states how to count ballots, he is, in my mind, giving people with open minds and hearts one gift after another.

One gift is Black Lives Matter. Another gift is the MeToo movement. A new gift is the resurgent Voting Rights Movement, headed by Stacy Abrams and Barack Obama. Another unique offering is Walls On Moms, now organizing in 25 cities to protest too much federal power.

I’ve read a half dozen stories now about a new and increasingly organized suburban women’s movement, united in opposition to Trump and his treatment of women. Volunteers are swarming Democratic female candidates. They are breaking records for campaign contributions. They are registering to vote.

They are determined to remove him from power. He will never get them back.

Every statement, lie or distortion seems to spawn and enrich people who care about democracy and freedom. None of these organizations existed before Trump, and everyone is growing and strengthening because of him.

Trump has given us the gift of awareness, the gift of coming together, the gift of rejecting and understanding racism, the gift of removing statues to slavers and people who committed treason, the gift of grasping the importance of climate change, the gift of arousing the young and the passion to a common cause.

I believe people who love truth and democracy have come together and joined hands and hearts in ways I have never seen in any presidential election. Finally, a common purpose. Finally, a worthy purpose, even several.

Early this year, Joe Biden was considered a failed candidate without any prospect of victory. As recently as January, he had raised less than $9 million in a single month.

As recently as June, he raised $141 million.

The presidential election will be fought on electoral terrain that would have been unthinkable. Six months ago, there was little chance of Democrats taking control of the Senate. Last week, the respected and non-partisan Cook Report reported that “Democrats appear to have expanded the playing field enough to put Republicans’ majority at risk.”

If you are paying attention, you may have noticed that he has also given us the gift of a media that is waking up and beginning to do what journalists should do.

Instead of passing along lies and gross distortions, they are doing their homework and making him squirm.

This week, Jonathan Swan, a reporter for Axios on HBO, discovered the magic words every good reporter learns when talking to a dishonest politician: Who? What? When? Where? How? And No, that is not true.

President Trump never looked more ill at ease, at a loss for words, so naked.

See for yourself the beautiful spectacle of a good reporter demolishing a man who is so used to lying without penalty or challenge.

Swan did his homework, and he is showing us what should have stopped Trump four years ago but is stopping him now.

Check out Chris Wallace (Fox News) and his classic demonstration of the power and art of the interview and the idea of accountability for powerful people.

Real journalists support the truth; they chip away at lies. For the first time, the media is not afraid of Trump any longer. They are calling out his lies.

I love journalism, I loved being a reporter, and I cared so much about the truth. It lifts my heart right to see that there are wonderful journalists still in the world, and they care about the truth.

That is another of his gifts.

But lying well is a double-edged sword.

Wherever he goes to tell his story now, there will be someone there to call him out when he lies. That never happened in 2016 or since.

We are defined by how we react to trouble; it’s no challenge to deal with good luck.

Trump’s greatest gift to me is, quite honestly, my sense that I am a better person now that I have ever been. He came into my life unexpectedly; he made me think about who I am and who I want to be.

And here I am, his latest gift. People throw labels at people all the time in our country. If you criticize Trump, you are on the left. If you like him, you are on the right.

These labels are how we dismiss ideas and thoughts we don’t wish to hear but often need to understand. Trump has given me the strength to stand in my truth and come to my mind about it.

No one defines me but me.

That is a greater gift, I think than he could ever imagine.