If the Trump Era has taught me two things, it is this:

Be good to people when you can.

America is not the country I thought it was.

In fact, it has never been as great as it claimed to be.

The two magazines I read the most are the National Review, the last stand of the conservative political movement, and the refurbished Atlantic, the most thoughtful and balanced archive of the American left.

To be honest, the websites, cable channels, and publications of the far left and far-right seem enraged and unhinged to me, like the President.

Reading them or watching them is like subscribing to a migraine headache.

Both publications remind me that it is possible to be divided, and still be civilized, humane, open-minded, and co-operative.

Democracy needs division and balance, but the point of each of these ideologies seems more and more to be about the hatred of each other, not the well being of the country.

Right now, it seems to me we are locked in a perpetual war, a boxing match without end between the far left and the far right, each too big to be perpetually denied, and too small to dominate themselves.

Trumpism has thrown our pride and joy, our long-functioning civic system, into turmoil, and it was already getting out of balance.

Rich Lowry of the National Review observes persuasively in his latest book The Case For Nationalism, that Trump really has no plan for governing in a second term, his campaign is almost entirely about giving the finger to America’s cultural left and his “Deep State,” which used to be called our government.

The left means to return the favor. On and on we go. Hopefully, a new leader may emerge with a better idea.

In 2016, Trump’s marketing instincts – fear of outsiders – were right on the money. That still works, but the pandemic may have saved the planet from a second term.

When I think of these last four years, I think of the night that changed my life; the night Donald Trump was nominated to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate.

Trump reignited turned an old deep American tradition, one that has been in remission for a short while, but which helps us understand what is happening today, which was xenophobia: who is an American?  The go-to-election strategy of countless demagogues throughout our history.

I think about Trump’s call to arms that night, especially now, as Americans get to vote for their very different ideas about the soul of the country.

The GOP platform put forward by Donald Trump stunned me; it was pure and naked xenophobia.

To many millions of people, it was the message they have long been waiting to hear.

My world was changing around me.

For those who are new to the term, xenophobia is an irrational or unreasoned aversion or hostility to, disdain for, or fear of foreigners, people from different cultures, faiths, or strangers.

Holocaust survivors are traumatized by xenophobia, as it was the focal point of Nazi Germany.

President Trump is no Hitler, but he is a xenophobe. His big contribution to xenophobia has been to broaden the idea to include opposition politicians, people who disagree with him,  Democrats, elitists, liberals, or progressives.

He sees everything outside of his loyal base as a threat, an enemy not only of him but of the people.

All of them, in his view, are dangerous outsiders threatening our way of life. He has encouraged his followers to mistrust or hate people who are foreign and dangerous or who don’t love their leader.

No one really knows if a billionnaire real estate developer is sincere about the hatred he spawns, but in a way, it doesn’t matter. He knows who he is speaking to and what they want to hear.

His rallies are the xenophobes equivalent of AA meetings.

In fact, he uses the same words to describe refugees and immigrants, and officials of the Democratic Party, and disaffected conservatives and Republicans.

The night I heard his nominating speech, I decided I needed to get focused in a positive way, my idea was to do good rather than argue about it and I began working with refugees and the elderly in assisted care.

We call this work The Army Of Good. This was one of the best ideas of my life.

These past years I have worked hard to understand rather than condemn the people who did this to our democracy and are not done yet if they can help it.

That has been a powerful, challenging, and frightening experience.

I’ve made some progress at understanding the fury and the pain of his supporters, especially the white non-college-educated men and women who have been left behind and abandoned by government and politicians alike.

They believe they have found their Messiah to lead them out of the wilderness, and they are just as fervent in their love for Donald Trump as any believers in God or Jesus.

Just imagine trying to talk a zealot out of zealotry (a/k/a demagogue disguised as a savior), and you can begin to grasp the dimensions of our civic and personal pain and trauma.

I’ve read at least a score of books about the Trump years, and two stand out as brilliant, edifying, and true.

One is Mary Trump’s book: Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.

I never quite understood President Trump until I read this book by his niece, a trained clinical psychologist. Once I read it, I understood him and his danger to our society. He no longer surprised me.

And every single thing Mary Trump said Trump would do he is doing or trying to do. Although she certainly has an ax to grind, she grinds it with insight, compassion, and professionalism. She explains him better than anyone has. This is not a tell-all book, it is a warning book.

The second book that stands out is a compelling work, perhaps the best book written about the meaning of the Trump era by anyone, including all those sociologists, pundits, and Washington insiders with breath-taking, insider,  scandalous stories to tell.

The title is America For Americans, and it was written by Erika Lee, historian, professor of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

The United States, she writes, has always prided itself (many of us) on being known as a nation of immigrants.

But it is also a nation of xenophobia.

Lee, a widely-acclaimed historian, and scholar, teaches us that deep and irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants, has been a defining feature of America from the colonial era to Donald Trump.

From Benjamin Franklin to Trump, German, Irish Catholic, Japanese, Mexicans, Catholics,  Jews, and others have been ridiculed, persecuted, and feared.

Today, the Trump administration has added to that list and singled out Muslims, Central Americans, and the so-called browning of America.

Xenophobia is not racism, and it is not nativism.

It is, to me, a prime cause of our division and lack of national unity. Trump didn’t create it, but like many demagogues throughout American history, he exploited it with great and underappreciated skill.

This definition of “nativism,” from the Atlantic Magazine, is the best I’ve read so far:

“Nature comes from the Latin root for birth, as in natal, the common origin of everyone. It shares that root with native, as in native land—where a person was born—and so it’s also aligned with nativism, the doctrine that ties political identity and membership to someone’s land of birth, and with nationalism, the myth that defines a people by their birth from a certain land. For centuries this myth has claimed blood and soil as identity, sovereignty, and passport. Trump’s nationalism, too, is bound up in American landscapes, in fights over what makes this place precious and who really belongs here.”

Xenophobia has often driven nativism, says Lee, which she defines as the naming of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers and their descendants as “natives” to the United States, and the granting of special privileges and protections to them.

Nativism is not the same thing as xenophobia, although they collide.

Its roots are in the early and mid-nineteenth century when white Protest settlers began using and claim the term native American for themselves, rather than for the  Native Americans who were already here.

They also sought to assert dominance over the new immigrants from Europe – especially Catholic Europe. It seems they still do.

Trump fits into both ideologies like a glove.

The President of all the people repeatedly suggested that immigrants and refugees have brought rape and violence to America, stolen American workers’ jobs, reduced American salaries, and stolen our health and educational service.

With the federal judiciary’s help, he has fought, blocked, terrorized immigrants and refugees in the cruelest and most relentless ways. None of the tens of millions of refugees needing homes worldwide are being admitted to America, and even legal immigration has been almost totally halted.

ICE raiding squads have terrified millions of undocumented workers, often resulting in imprisonment, separation from children, and deportation. This has delighted his supporters and horrified Democrats and progressives.

Certainly, immigration will return, if for no other reason than big business needs it to grow and provide cheap labor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hates helping the poor but always fights for more immigrants.

Lee has traced xenophobia all the way back to the American Revolution, and she has followed it closely through the Trump years.

Ever since Trump launched his presidential campaign, she writes,  Trump vowed to beef up border security, ban Muslim immigrants, and deport every undocumented person living in the United States.

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented workers in America; he also pledged to build a massive wall along our southern border with Mexico.

He would bully Mexico into paying for it,  he promised. As the Republican Party’s official nominee, his shockingly extreme and divisive views were suddenly being repeated and amplified by a growing number of voters and politicians and a mushrooming alternative far-right media verse.

Increasingly, they have entered the mainstream.

His opening theme was classically xenophobic – “Make America Great Again,” the mantra of xenophobic demagogues throughout American political history. Hatred and paranoia were patriotic once more, and not for the first time.

The idea was always the same: the whiter America was, the greater. Nativists and white nationalists heard the call. David Duke, a national leader of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed Trump right away. Finally, he wrote.

Speaker after speaker at that convention painted an awful and frightening portrait of a country under siege by immigrant criminals, terrorists, and gang members.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliana – one of Trump’s most determined warriors and shameless liars – told the convention that Hillary Clinton would support “open borders” that would admit hordes of Syrian refugees posing as operatives but who are terrorists heading for Western Europe and the United States to kill us.

None of this turned out to be true, but Trump claimed that was because his policies worked.

It marked the first time Catch-22 would be the inspiration for American domestic and foreign policy but not the last.

U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, the next U.S. Attorney General, falsely claimed that 350,000 people had succeeded in crossing American borders illegally “every single year.” He also blamed immigrants for taking away jobs from Americans.

We know now, and some people knew then, that almost all of Trump’s statements and the other convention speakers were either blatantly false or grossly misleading. Immigrants commit far less crime than American citizens.

But Trump has revised the idea of truth to his followers. Truth is no longer what is real, but what he says is real. Thus it cannot be challenged, disproven, or denied. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a “fake” person or a “loser” or an enemy.

Trump also learned that there were no consequences for lying for his followers, especially when it came to xenophobia.

The crowd at the Republican convention went wild when Trump identified immigration as one of the greatest threats to the United States, and he promised to restore America’s “immigration security.”

He was repeatedly interrupted by cheers, applause, and chants of “Build The Wall,” which became a successful Presidential campaign’s trademark cheer.

The immigration story I grew up with was of a generous and tolerant nation opening up its arms to the suffering of the poor and needy.

We were a melting pot, leading the world in immigration and refuge, a country that valued its image as a haven for refugees. Politicians referred to us as a “nation of immigrants.”

Then, they turned around and passed laws making it harder for immigrants to stay here and live here. In the Trump era, undocumented workers fear to go to doctors or call the police. ICE might be waiting.

The story obscures a more complicated and violent history, which includes invasion, native dispossession, and slavery, as well as a country that welcomes (sometimes) racial and ethnic diversity.

That is the immigration story my grandparents loved and that I love – the place of safety, opportunity, and equality.

Could this be the America Donald Trump talks about when he suggests that three American congresswomen of different ethnicity should “go back where they came from,” even though where they came through is here?

I thought Trump was speaking a hateful and alien language when it comes to immigrants and refugees, but I understand now that he reflected nearly half the country; he wasn’t betraying them.

My education was admittedly incomplete. Americans don’t really love the story Lee is telling in her book.

Perhaps this is why we never seem to heal. It takes George Floyd lying on the ground with a knee in his back to get us to even think about facing the truth about ourselves. And then we start screaming about law and order.

I love my country, but I don’t romanticize it as much as I did.

I also understand why Trump and his followers are so angry about those Confederate statues. The movement to tear the statues down terrifies them; it threatens the end of nativism and xenophobia both.

The people tearing down those statues speak of a different American than the one most of us were taught. It isn’t the textbook America, the real America,  not the xenophobes are terrified of that idea spreading.

The war on socialism, funded and enabled by billionaires and corporations (workers get more money) is not about socialism at all, it is all about more outsiders coming here to destroy us.

Democratic socialism might not be right for America, but it is hardly a devilish conspiracy to gobble up our democracy.

That would undermine Trump’s entire platform.

He claims these statures are our heritage, and that is true. They are also our very white heritage, a daily affront to the black, brown, and yellow ones.

But, as Lee points out in her detailed and meticulously researched book, we also have and always been a xenophobic nation.

Even as the United States has welcomed millions worldwide, it has also deported more immigrants than any other nation -over fifty-five million since 1882.

Americans have been wary and afraid of almost every group of foreigners that have come to our country: German immigrants in the eighteenth century, Irish and Chinese in the nineteenth century; Italians, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans in the twentieth century, and Muslims today.

Americans have labeled immigrants threatening because they were poor,  practiced a faith other than Christianity, and were nonwhite.

Ambitious American politicians have long complained that there are too many immigrants, that they were not assimilating, that they were taking jobs away from deserving Americans, were bringing crime and disease into the country, had dangerous new political ideas, were unamerican, or Trump’s case, that they hate America.

Again and again, the United States has passed discriminatory immigration laws and detained, incarcerated, and expelled immigrants.

We exploit them, use them to work jobs Americans no longer want, hire them to work on farms and clean houses, we permit them to be in America but refuse to accept them as fully and really American.

We see now, says Lee, is not the first time demagogues have exploited xenophobia to gain political power; it has gone on since the Republic’s birth.

Lee is also eloquent about the costs of xenophobia.

“Xenophobia threatens American democracy,” she writes. “It allows the will of a vocal and mobilized minority (and judiciary) to dictate policy for the majority. Public opinion polls showed that most Americans rejected Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and opposed his xenophobic policies before and into the first year of the Trump presidency.”

A majority of Americans supported legal status for immigrants brought to the United States without documentation as children, as well as an increase in legal immigration. What they did not support was a bigger border wall.

Their preferences were cast aside.

Lee makes a strong case that American democratic processes and institutions have been used to support, legalize, and facilitate xenophobia.

This well-documented, thoughtful, and persuasive book – America for Americans – is an extraordinary work of history and political science. It helped me understand my country as much as anything I have ever read.

Xenophobia threatens national unity; it divides the country as much or more as any other issue. It permits white supremacy and white nationalism to come to the forefront of American politics and culture.

It embraces only some people as Americans, while others forever remain angry and disconnected outsiders.

To me, the arduous work begins well after November 3. Trump already acts like a loser, whining and shouting and spewing hatred.

If Biden wins, he faces a bitterly divided country with its xenophobic leader raising all kinds of hell from his new TV or radio network.

He will be happy there, soaking up all the attention a 74-year-old man can absorb. And he’ll have so much to whine about. He might make a poor President, but he is our greatest National Whiner.

Like the trade deals or not, we are living in a new and completely unprecedented global migration as economic, political, social, and environmental forces continue to drive people from their homes.

Trump’s much-touted wall is an international joke, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping too many illegal immigrants either. And Mexico is not paying a penny for it.

I hope it will become a standing monument to the futility, immorality, and hypocrisy of xenophobia, which, it turns out, is also as American as apple pie.

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The polls are really not expected to change much between today and Monday. FiveThirtyEight now gives Trump 10 wins in 100 outcomes, and Biden 90 wins in 100 outcomes.

It is still possible for Trump to win, but a long shot. The polls would have to be much farther off than they were in 206, and the evidence suggests they are more accurate, not less.