One way for me to look at the ugly drama unfolding in Washington is to remember that I am seeing something almost unprecedented in American history, the collapse of a presidency in real-time, and on screens.

It is exciting. Every time I look at the news, I think of the great Yankees announcer Mel Allen, whose great line when a home run was hit was “how about that?”

It’s getting painful for me to even look at Donald Trump, he is so desperate and so terrified. He can’t stop pretending to be tough, even while he’s coming apart. His make up today was an inch thick, and he can’t hide the puffed-up cheeks of the steroid taker.

What’s most interesting and important is not what is here today, but what is to come. Once a day, I count all of the revolutionary movements Trump has inspired,  none of them from his own people.

The most important thing about Trump is the most surprising: he is boring now, that was once unimaginable; nobody is listening anymore but the media.

When the Russians wanted to torture people, they locked them in cells with loudspeakers blaring. That is what it’s like to live in Trump’s America.

All of our nerves are shot.

Usually, breakdowns are rarely done in public. I can testify to that. I don’t think I could have survived that.

I know most of the people reading this don’t care to hear it, but it is painful for me to see any human being come apart in the way Donald Trump is coming apart.

We all have a choice; we can tremble and wring our hands, or step away a bit, and look ahead to the light.

Of all the things to bring this president down, I didn’t figure on mental illness. But of course, it was always there to see.

I hope that Trump’s chilling demise awakens people to the harm done by mental illness. We have always tended to blame the mentally ill for being ill. We don’t blame people who have Parkinson’s Disease for getting it.

I can’t diagnose Trump, but he is sick, and as one who has suffered from mental illness, I know it is not his fault. I can hate what he does easily enough, but I can’t help but see him as a tormented and terrified human being.

It is clear from reading Mary Trump’s book that his father was abusive and a sociopath.

There it is, you don’t have to look a lot farther. Abuse does great and terrible harm.

There’s a lot of talk among hopeful and nervous progressives about our being a kinder and gentler nation. But that only seems to apply to people whose politics we like.

I am a follower of John Lewis, who wrote: “The journey begins with faith – faith in the dignity and the worth of every human being. That is an idea with roots in scripture and in the canon of America, in Genesis, and in the Declaration of Independence.

You have to believe that. You have to believe it. It’s all going to work out.”

That would be a perfect way to get started with the healing and renewal America needs more than anything else; what a powerful way to start the next chapter.

With respect and dignity, not contempt and rage.

If his legacy is to turn us into him, we are really in trouble.

I am not interested in grievance; there is a lot of good that needs doing out there. What an opportunity to do it.

Gloating would be disastrous, so I hope I don’t forget to continue to think about our bleeding rural heartland, suffering as much or more as any people or other parts of the country.

If we forget them again, they will find another Trump; there are always demagogues hiding in the bushes, waiting for hatred to come into fashion when government breaks its promises.

The Michigan nationalists are a marker of how close to the abyss we came. Good on the FBI. Be strong. Stay calm.

In his sickness, Trump fused his grievance with the true haters and triggered a fire tornado of anger and hatred. Think of it as a kind of political sex, a mating in Hell.

Usually, it takes a lot of cunning and grounding to get through the grueling ordeal of running for President in America. The weak and the troubled usually get weeded out.

Usually, that process leaves no stone unturned. Trump bypassed the processing by rejecting it and by promising to tear it down. The world turned down – people loved him for every awful and repulsive thing he has done, from lying to sexual harassment to infidelity.

His followers took a gamble with him. He has betrayed them.

What people want – and need and deserve – is change, not mayhem or anarchy. The truly brilliant pundit of this presidential campaign was Mary Trump, who nailed it from the beginning.

She warned us.

In my first columns about politics,  I repeatedly wrote that Trump was over, that he was too damaged to pull off a second term.

Some people threatened to kill me, of course, and others insisted on patronizing me: we hope you are right, but what about 2016?

I think the time for bedwetting needs to be over, not only because it is annoying, but because it is dangerous and unproductive.

We dodged a bullet. Gratitude.

It’s really time to start thinking past Trump and talk about and consider what we are going to do with all of the revolutions sprouting in Trump’s wake.

Our country is broken now, and we have just been reminded of the importance of fixing it.

Trump has opened a Pandora’s box, all right, but this was not the box he intended to open, or that his disenchanted and aggrieved supporters wanted him to open.

I’m weary of the endless arguing and deepening hatred, as most people are, and Trump is no longer even entertaining, just pathetic. He has exposed his broken core.

I expect him to try to auction off the Lincoln Memorial to some billionaires next week to get some publicity and suck in some money.

Since he is incapable of bowing out gracefully, he will just have to bow out or be dragged away.

Older white men – about four million of them – love Fox News, but the problem with watching too much of it is that you have no idea what is really happening.

I wondered why Trump supporters are so blustery and confident in the face of looming disaster, but now I understand it.

They aren’t lying, they really don’t know what is going on out there because they have not seen or heard a thing about it. In their bubble,  Trump is David slaying Goliath.

Trump is so isolated now he only to pre-approved versions of himself.

Every day, a dozen people assure me he will win. They have no doubt about it.

Instead of Goliath, he turned out to be Icarus, a mortal who was convinced he could fly, so he invented a pair of wings that took him up to the heavens and beyond. His story is a tragic one because he flew too high, and when he approached the sun, the heat melted the wax holding his wings together, and he fell to his death.

Trump was called to drain the swamp but became the swamp.

Joe Biden surprised me by running what is so far a flawless and disciplined campaign. He and his staff read it just right from the beginning.

All he had to do was sit back and be nice, and Trump would do the rest. Biden’s brilliant maneuvering out of the last two debates was pure genius, he dug a hole for Trump, and Trump, who listens to nothing but the mad voices in his head, fell right in.

There is no need or reason for Trump to get another crack at 60 million people. Let him yak with Rush Limbaugh and the breakfast gang at Fox News. That will get him absolutely nowhere.

I’m wary of the traumatized who can’t let go of their trauma and neuroses long enough to grasp what is beginning to happen, and what it means. Get up, I want to shout, we are almost there!

I’m more interested in the future than the fiery and dehumanizing decline of President Trump. I’m also nervous, not about Trump, but about our losing the moment. We don’t want to do this again.

America doesn’t want an angry and disturbed President who can’t even bring himself to condemn white nationalists planning to attack and murder a governor for trying to save lives.

Democracy is rarely pretty, but in my lifetime, it has never been uglier than this. There are all sorts of things for us to consider now. Am I ready?

For America, which so desperately needed a kick in the ass, one is right here, every single day.

It seems great change is coming to America, and for me, it’s time to start thinking about the future.

Trump will try in desperation to challenge the results of the election; he will not succeed. Short of armed revolution, which will not happen in the United States, he will be defeated by a wide and irrefutable margin.

The most powerful people and institutions in the country are intact.

He polluted and corrupted them but never quite obliterated the civic core of the country.

That is always his problem; he has no patience or skill at strategy or organizing. You can’t take over the world’s oldest democracy with tweets and rallies. You actually have to do something.

Trump doesn’t do long term strategy or organizing.

There is no way he can call on the Army or the vast federal bureaucracy to support him, and there is no way he can take over an ice cream stand without them

After the election, the real work will begin.

The pollsters I trust and respect say they have never seen a candidate disintegrate so completely as Trump in his twilight. I don’t care and they don’t care about 2016, this is 2020.

I don’t believe in ghosts.

He is losing women, shedding the older voters, suburban voters, independents and moderates, Midwestern voters, Southeastern voters, even some Southern voters.

Lots of people love him and will find a way to keep him alive, but not by running the country.

We are a broken country.

We have forgotten how to talk to one another.

We need a new language to talk to all the many people government has failed.  A new language for a race, a new language for women, a new language for white working-class men.

We need to learn how to listen.

We have to figure out a way to get through to one another.

That’s a tall order for any new president to fill. Or for me. As a writer, I am going to try.

Our new leaders will have to seek a better path to race relations than anyone has yet figured out how to do.

If there is a women’s revolution, there is also a black revolution; blacks are registering to vote in staggering numbers. There is an opening for true dialogue and real change.

As awful as it is, the scientists and doctors know how to knock down the pandemic, they’ve done it in a score of countries, and there is little doubt a vaccine is coming within the next six months, if not sooner.

Left to their own, the doctors will help us figure it out. That could be a profoundly uplifting moment.

Trump has also triggered a revolution among the elderly.

If the polls hold, Joe Biden will be the first Democratic presidential nominee in 20 years to win most senior citizens. In a riveting piece in Politico, Nora Super, a researcher on the politics of aging, explains why.

Seniors left uniquely vulnerable by the virus, and largely abandoned by Trump and the Republic Party, and without any plan to bring them safely back into society, are rethinking what it means to be old.

“COVID set us back, unfortunately, on some of the negative stereotypes about aging,” wrote Super. “We’ve seen the pervasive ageism in our society, and that has energized older people to say, ‘Hey, I’m not dead yet.”

When Trump and his supporters said the virus is no big deal and will disappear, the elderly got the message: nobody cares if you are the ones who die. That alone will transform our politics, more than 10,000 people a day become 65 and over.

Journalists, too busy covering Trump’s raving press conferences and rallies, have been too distracted to notice what Super says is a historic transformation. Being older, she says, no longer fits our stereotypes of aging.

And the aging are not likely to trust their fates to Trump again.

That’s just one of the revolutions Trump has provoked. Women are going to do him in, a transformation of power that will change our country as much or more as anything else.

For years, I have believed women offer us the best chance to deal with the challenges of our time and our world. Getting rid of Donald Trump is their first big step in the new era.

I think Trump’s real legacy will be to mark the fall of the angry white men as the dominant force in our country. We old white men did a lousy job of running the world, time to get out of the way.

I think women have already shown they can be tough, gentler, and kinder in government.

There are so many of them waiting in line to come up. Kamala Harris broke the barrier, but she will not be as lonely as other women might have been in her position.

When I put my nose up to the wind, I smell change. You have to believe it. It’s all going to work out.

How about that?

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In FiveThirtyEight’s daily simulations, Joe Biden was favored 85 out of 100 times if the election were held today, Donald Trump 15 out of 100. This doesn’t mean Trump couldn’t conceivably win, but it does mean it’s becoming nearly impossible for him to do so with just a few weeks to go and millions of people already voting.