It’s a good time to write about Donald Trump’s biggest mistake, mostly because it is happening right before us every single day.  You can all see it for yourselves.

Governing with only his core supporters – with some of the people – in mind, rather than more or even most people, was perhaps the biggest violation of the most sacred of presidential norms.

Trump bulldozed right through many of those norms, but he never stopped to do the math. He doesn’t have enough people. And he just won’t talk to anybody else.

For those core supporters, finding Trump was the equivalent of a political erection. They were, as he was, orgiastic to find each other.

Finally, somebody was listening to them. And for him, finally, large numbers of people adored him without challenge or hesitation. They call it Narcissists Heaven. He was a God; he had much of the world’s power and all the attention anyone could want.

He listened only to them and did every single thing they wanted him to do, and in return, they listened only to him and praised every stupid thing he did, as well as the good.

Because they could never criticize him, they made it possible for him to self-destruct, because he was always a frightened little boy inside, in way over his head. And he felt no restraint.

He was praised for everything he did.

They did him no favors by giving him so much unconditional love. He was never a real politician, and he had no incentive to learn.

Trump described his love affair with his MAGA people this way: “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and nobody would care.” And he was right.

Any day now, I expect to look at the news and read about how he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and the media didn’t bother even to report it.

His supporters organized a Boat Rally Down The Hudson River to celebrate his courage. The victim’s parents were invited to the White House.

The scary part is that I can see it.

Maybe it really happened already.   It was just Trump being Trump, being a businessman, shaking things up. Don’t take it too seriously. Why is everybody picking on him all the time?

But all those dead victims of the coronavirus are not following the script; they are not laughing. Suddenly, it was worse than somebody getting shot on Fifth Avenue.

Trump showed himself to be a serial norm-breaker, enthusiastically ignorant of the rules and traditions of democracy.

One reporter wrote, “he doesn’t just break a norm once; he comes back and stomps on it to make sure.”

People like me were not invited along on this great adventure, which was clear on Inauguration Day when Trump talked about “American carnage.” I understood him to be talking about me and not for me.

“I’ll be able to make sure that when you want down the street in your inner city, or wherever you are, you’re not going to be shot,” he promised during the campaign. “Your child isn’t going to be shot.”

He didn’t keep that promise. In 46 weeks in 2019, there were 45 school shootings, 32 at schools serving Kindergarten through 12th grade.

There were more mass shootings across the U.S. in 2019 than there were days in the year – 417, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

Hundreds, if not thousands, of children, were shot or died in gun accidents or gang or accidental or drive-by shootings.

The carnage was worse than it has ever been. Your children are getting shot every day.

From that day, his Inauguration, Trump never spoke to me, thought of me, or cared about me or any of my concerns. Millions of people like me were disenfranchised; we had no president, no government representing us in Washington.

Absolutely no one worried about what we felt or thought. It was eerie, my whole of idea of citizenship suddenly didn’t work.

I never felt that before.

In our country, every president ever elected at least pretended to be president of all the people. Trump never pretended for a second.

His followers say he was honest and tweets too much.

Otherwise, he is a godsend, some insist he was sent by God himself. Did God make him sick too?

I remember thinking if that didn’t change,  if he didn’t start seeing more people as his people too, then we were all heading for big trouble, the president included.

And here we are.

This President denies ever making a mistake and takes responsibility for nothing, yet he trumpets his biggest mistake in plain view almost every day as the election approaches.

He only talks to his people, with his tweets, his rallies, his hand-picked cable news channel, his lies, and distortions.

He never talks to anyone else and promises to speak for them, not for all of us. He tosses them hats and favors when he arrives, and they scream with excitement and joy.

And that is his biggest mistake as he prepares to rush from one rally to another, to soak up all that adoration, unless he faints from exhaustion and fever and keels over, which seems quite possible. He has them all on his side already.

In his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Donald Trump told us, “I am your voice,” and “I alone can fix it,” I took notice. It was an important statement.

I was hopeful for a moment. People need a strong voice from their leader, although his boasting was a warning sign.

Two months later, Princeton University political theorist Jan-Werner Muller described the core tenet of populism, and the heart and soul of Trump’s Presidency, as well as his downfall, in his book What Is Populism?

His answer:

“Only some of the people are really the people.”

Trump was speaking to his most ardent followers and also stating his populist credentials. But he forgot about the rest of the people. He had nothing to say to them.

Now, when he needs them the most, they are lost to him.

Mr. Trump may be the most dishonest President we have ever had, but he is also the most unconsciously transparent, we can witness his stumbles and falls.

He and his rabid followers have found a new and chilling dance, the Covid-19 dance, in which they race across the country every day for weeks getting their combat ribbons by risking one another’s lives and giving the moon to those sissified elites who wear masks.

Outside of combat, is there any greater love than that between Trump and his followers?

Has any American politician been so adored and repeatedly forgiven for outrageous things, some of them crimes?

His followers angrily reject the idea that they are a cult, and he is the cult leader. I think they are right. Trump and his followers are in love.

They gave one another what no one else had or could. Their love is beyond words.

He is something else, something new; there isn’t really a word for such blind adoration with nothing but ugly big red hats in return.

Another perk comes with adoring Donald Trump: you get to do all kinds of things that upset the grownups, like go to tailgate parties and get to buy T-shirts and hats and scream in big stadiums for hours demanding that people you don’t like getting locked up. That’s new also.

I watch those rallies, and I think of the old carnivals who rolled into town with much fanfare and lots of miracles for sale.

He will brush us off, and they will cheer him on.

The man who says he is a perfectly sane genius falls apart publicly in the dumbest and most pointless ways. The man who is making America Great shrinks it by the day.

The man who says that he alone can solve our problems can’t even keep himself out of the hospital.

And just for good measure, he’s sent a bunch of other people there as well.

I mean, how tough is that?

Trump’s biggest mistake has been on display for months now, but it has reached a catharsis lately. His people are not as powerful as they thought. And neither is he.

The wolves are at his heels, and he is literally running for his life – all over the country, every day, for weeks, unless his 74-year-old overweight body gives out. I suspect it will.

The Great Pretender has lost his magic, his moho, he sounds more and more like one of those schizophrenic street people cursing at busses.  And he doesn’t look good—too much thick make-up, that orange thing on his head.

There is nothing sadder than an aging movie star who can’t do it anymore.

His very devoted followers don’t know yet that he is doomed; no one they trust has told them. And the people they trust will never tell them.

But it doesn’t matter; it only draws them closer together, makes them closer. They will never abandon this ship, even as the pols are running for the exits. They’ll happily go down with it.

I’m reading a brilliant new book by Carlos Lozada, the prize-winning non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post. It’s called What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History Of the Trump Era.

At first, the title surprised me. I didn’t really notice that the Trump era had much of an intellectual history. I was wrong; I was looking in the wrong places.

This book is right up my alley.

Like me, Lozada sees the Trump era as ending, despite the quivering of the traumatized progressives (a/k/a) the “bedwetters,” as they are known.

Lozada was preparing for it. He could feel it coming.

His book reviews all of the books of the Trump era. Like me, he finds the most interesting books don’t come out of scandal, impeachment, or corruption.

They are about what we were thinking away from Trump’s crisis and Trump himself. Lozada understands that to understand Trump, you have to get away from him and Washington and look to the heartland.

“This president has challenged principles, practices, and standards of American life,” Lozada writes, “on the accountability and legitimacy of our leaders, on who can take part in the American experiment. With that challenge in mind, the books that matter most right now are not necessarily those revealing White House intrigue, policy disputes, or official scandals, no matter how crucial those subjects. Instead, they are the books that enable and ennoble a national reexamination – one that Trump has attempted to carry out on his own and our own behalf. They are the books that show how our current conflicts fit into the nation’s story, that hold fast to the American tradition of always seeing ourselves anew.”

Amen to that.

The Trump era sent writers and scholars and academics rushing all over the country to explore the discontent that spawned Trumpism and to try to document and explain it.

They say, Steve Bannon, a right-wing theorist and the then editor of the Breitbart News, a very conservative website, first put the angry white men idea into Trump’s head.

Bannon, a brilliant and eccentric far-right theorist, noticed the angry working-class white men and women online. They were seething, conspiracy-minded, hostile,  and ripe for a leader who understood them and spoke their language of bitterness and grievance.

Trump, who  Bannon later said had never met or spoken with a working-class white person in his life, got it right away.

He found a focus and rationale for his Blitzkrieg run for the Presidency – it was white grievance and displacement and elitism in a diversifying world.

The rest is history.

It has never really been clear who was Frankenstein in that story, and who was the monster.

Bannon didn’t last long in the White House, where Trump brought him; he was not nearly adoring enough, and he talked to people in the media. He was recently arrested and jailed for alleged fraud.

Trump’s real intellectual history was out in the heartland,  just where Bannon said it was, and online, from Twitter to Reddit to the Dark Web.

This where his angry supporters live, and where their lives had been falling apart for decades, their rage growing by the minute.

Lozado called the first wave of Trump Era books the Chaos Chronicles.

The nation’s best thinkers finally awakened to the fact that our next impending minority – angry white working-class people – were angry, neglected, and suffering greatly as minorities in America tend to do.

We learn that Trump sat around compiling enemies lists with his staff, that he mused openly about building a moat with alligators on the southern border to fend off immigrants, and that senior aides stole documents off of his desk hoping he would forget about them (which he often did.)

We learn that this is a President who abandoned most of his people, so many were willing to stick with him until he ran away from the pandemic and hid.

“In plain view, Trump was flaunting, ignoring, and destroying all institutions of accountability,” Masha Gessen wrote in Surviving Autocracy (2020).

“In plain view, he was degrading political speech. In plain view, he was using his office to enrich himself.  In plain view, he was courting dictator after dictator. In plain view, he was promoting xenophobic conspiracy theories, now claiming that millions of immigrants voting illegally had cost him the popular vote, now insisting, repeatedly, that Obama had him wiretapped. All of this, though plainly visible, was unfathomable.”

But not to his MAGA worshippers. They ate it all up. Finally, they could do to others what had been done to them – ridicule, denigrate, and ignore.  It was payback time.

Vengeance for Trump – and his own grievances – was not the Lord’s. It was his.

But there was the mistake.

Politics and farming have a lot in common. You have to grow and harvest things to succeed constantly. You can’t ever stop expanding.

This is a big country with a lot of different people. You can’t stay in power with just one kind unless you’re a congressman or woman in a gerrymandered district.

You need to be growing followers every day, just like Congress members have to spend most of their time raising money, or a CEO has to keep profits rising. When you stop growing (or raising money), you become prey, not the hunter but the dinner.

Trump has no instinct or knowledge of different kinds of people other than his core. He has no idea how to talk to them.

For that matter, he knew little about his followers. They aren’t at the White House too often.

He forgot to do the math.

If only 30 or 40 percent of the people like you, you have to get another ten percent or more to stay in power. You at least have to get past 50.

The most interesting thing about Trump is his refusal to grow the core. He seems to have decided that he will win by pretending to be tough, not by being wise.

He watches Fox News all day and offers himself for interviews to most of the hosts. He thinks this is governing. He can’t stop talking about himself, and the anchors have to cut him off.

He has created an impenetrable bubble around himself, and thus lost touch with reality.

He seemed from the first to despise more than half the country; he ridiculed Democrats, bureaucrats, Gold Star fathers, people in cities, strong women, generals.

He is desperate to throw his opponents in jail and is particularly obsessed with  Barack Obama, the polar opposite of him in every way.

He ran against Obama in 2016 and is running against him still.

Trump passed every litmus test for authoritarianism, wrote Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die (2018). “Very often, populist outsiders do,” they are the leaders who claim to embody the people, standing firm against a corrupt, selfish, and loosely defined elite.

Standing firm against me, I couldn’t help but notice, an over the hill blogger and book writer living out his life on a tiny farm in upstate New York.

I always had the feeling Trump hated me and people like me or people he thought I must be like.

I know he didn’t know me or care about me, and when I needed him the most – when the pandemic broke and the world turned upside down – he wanted nothing to do with me.

At times like that, government matters. People will not forgive him for that.  I won’t soon forget it either.

When he got sick, he had a chance to make amends. He didn’t.

Trump began to scare the people who were not his people.

He went out of his way to insult, patronize, and try to humiliate strong women. He threatened the election, laughed off the virus.

He seemed to hate strong women, just as the women’s revolution gained strength, depth, and power.

Now, at the end of his rope, when there is at least some time to draw more people to his rescue, he won’t do it. He won’t even try to do it. Like his niece said, he can’t do it.

He thought his Supreme Court nominee might do it for him. But when grandma is dying, and there is no paycheck, people don’t care much about the Supreme Court.

I said months ago that I wasn’t sure  Trump really wanted to do this for four more years.

He doesn’t have it in him to start kissing the asses of the independents and moderates he needs to win the election.

He might be too proud or too deluded; the people who know him say he lives in delusion and denial; he thinks he is so great that he is invincible.

Thus the Superman post-corona virus act and the reason he can’t change. If you are never wrong, why would you change?

Here comes the next chapter: a nationally syndicated radio talk show. The next Limbaugh, although Limbaugh seems smarter to me than Trump, he is a self-made man.

I am reconciled to the fact that Trump will never go away.

Long after he finally dies, a disembodied voice will keep broadcasting gibberish, conspiracy theories, and lies. And whine about his mistreatment. And call reporters every day, you know, the fake news ones.

He is in our heads, he will never leave. He left his mark on the world in ways no one imagined.

Weeks of rushing from one rally to another won’t do squat to help his re-election. He has blown yet another great opportunity to show he is human and empathetic and can relate to other people.

So this is how it ends for him; he has evolved into an angry, disconnected, even pathetic shell of a leader. His biggest achievement has perhaps been forcing us to re-examine our amazing country and figure out how to heal all of the deep wounds.

If the doctors are right, he will make himself sick in the next couple of weeks.

But our reckoning post-Trump is no small thing, and it was long overdue.

The intersecting crises of 2020 – the coronavirus, ass unemployment, social upheaval, Trump’s recklessness – seemed to all reinforce the grievances and inequalities and injustices of the American story.

It seems to me sometimes that half of the country is competing with the other half to be the most aggrieved and least happy, and all of them have pretty good arguments to make.

The pandemic had African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, the low-income, Blacks, the elderly, service workers, worse than others, and made clear the tragic and gaping holes in our health care system.

More than 250 years ago, the founders declared political equality a self-evident, even sacred, right. But inequality persists. Donald Trump backlit our greatest flaws by inflating some and creating others.

Patching up our damaged norms is only the beginning of all of the hard work ahead of us.

“Those norms must be made to work in an age of racial equality and unprecedented ethnic diversity,” wrote Levitsky and Ziblatt. “Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge.”

The Trump era brought much of this into focus and woke up millions of people were sound asleep when it came to civics.

We lost touch with our own history, so many people have no idea what it meant.

Can you really love Donald Trump and democracy too? What are they really trying to tell us?

This time, and at least for now, it’s everybody’s fight.

Donald Trump succeeded in disrupting us. We are definitely taking a new and deep look at things.

As to Trump himself, he has already left the battlefield, even as fear of him grows and deepens. He is on Mars in political terms.

He is off on his national tour, his big and final mistake, talking to himself and his loyal but dwindling Army of the faithful.

No one will ever write a book about my life, there are already dozens of books about him, and he isn’t nearly dead. He mattered; he was consequential beyond expectations.

We will be talking about him and explaining to him, and in this way, looking at ourselves simultaneously.

It turns out he was the mirror on the wall.