The most interesting thing about this night is that Donald Trump’s humiliating and prolong defeat – tonight or down the road – was unnecessary.

The election was a moral referendum, one of the country’s biggest ever,  something his traumatized opponents are still slow to grasp.

He is in so much trouble today because of his own personal pandemic:  immorality and cruelty.

Trump didn’t create an immoral nation; he brought it back to life.

Just ask the millions of kids, women, blacks, Hispanics who have decided to join the great American experiment at its most critical time – the election of a leader.

Caring people might want to rejoice for a bit before they resume their hand wringing over 2016.

And for a President so anxious to win,  it was so unnecessary.

To me, this presidential election has always been about morality – right or wrong – as much or more as it is about policy and political affiliation.

The thing that most baffles me tonight, on the eve of Donald Trump’s death struggle and defeat, is how unnecessary his worst and most self-defeating acts of cruelty have been.

He could have gotten everything he wanted, and he threw it away.

I’ll leave it to the historians to try to figure out why so many Americans blindly supported his cruelty, his arrogance, and his lawlessness. I just don’t know.

I’m drawn to the larger idea of this as a moral, not just political, process.

I’m guessing his niece Mary Trump was right: since Donald Trump has no grasp of morality or appetite for doing the right thing, he couldn’t possibly be moral or do the right thing. Thinking only of himself has worked for him all of his privileged life, and he seems unable to comprehend that that can’t work in a time of such  painful crisis.

They say that living and working in the White House changes a person and infuses them with awe and tradition.

Trump never seemed to be touched by any of that.

Play golf so often while so many people died?

Did he really need to separate children from their parents at the border? Violate the law by asking a foreign leader to investigate an opponent or enrich himself and his property by trading off on his government position?

Why did he pursue that ridiculous wall by repeatedly skipping around Congress and promising we wouldn’t pay for it? Why did he punish and pursue the brave people in government who stood up for the right thing and questioned his ethics?

Why did he let so many people die needlessly for the greater good of his booming economy? Why did he brag about sticking his tongue down the throats of women and grabbing their “pussies” because he could?

What kind of President did we think we were getting?

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The historians and lawyers call these extra-legal deeds  Acts Of State, acts committed outside the legal framework and seen as beyond a court’s jurisdiction.

These acts are justified in this way: sovereign governments may turn to extraordinary and extralegal means when the state’s very existence depends on it.

These acts are acceptable if they were necessary to achieve a greater good.

Donald Trump has justified his handling of the pandemic and skirting the law many other acts in just this way: it is necessary to permit the sacrifice of many thousands of American citizens for the greater good of the country – a robust economy, full employment, and the end of the federal government’s historic role as our helper of last resort.

It was easy for people to disregard his immorality and contempt for tradition as the quirky traits of colorful businessmen. Americans have learned in recent years to judge the quality and meaning of life by the money they have, not the morality and humanity of their lives.

But his response to the coronavirus was something that was just too much for too many people to bear. A leader who can’t even pretend to care about the dying is empty in the soul and the heart.

He admits he knew the virus was dangerous a long time ago, he admits he said nothing in order to protect the economy and thereby his re-election.

If the greater good is threatened, then he has a point. Such a government cannot be bound by conventional legal imitations or moral considerations.

But is America’s greater good really tied to the President’s re-election? A lot of people think so. I don’t.

Among the most famous examples of such an Act of State is the World War II bombing of Dresden, which killed between 22,700 to 25,000 noncombatant German citizens, or the assassination of Osama Bin Laden without the permission or notification of the Pakistani government, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War Two, or the murder of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad by American drones, all four a clear violation of international law.

In those cases, Americans and most of the international community judged these acts of extralegal violence to be necessary, thus justified as Acts Of State.

But the interesting thing about Trump’s acts of state is that hardly any of them can really be seen as necessary.

From a distance, and if the country still had two functioning political parties,  he could have been impeached at least a dozen times. He was beginning to turn much of the government into a personal, often criminal enterprise – the historic move of the autocrat.

But even though he declared himself innocent, lots and lots of people were beginning to think otherwise.

President Trump came to office with his moral underpinnings in shambles – a philander, an abuser, a tax cheat, and a business fraud. He already knew how to justify his immoral decisions as necessary for his greater good. He didn’t have to learn a thing. And he got a lot of adoration and approval for it.

He is breaking the law in full view every day by undermining America’s faith in the integrity of its prized election system; Putin can retire, Trump is doing his dirty work of bringing chaos to our elections for him.

This is brazenly illegal, if not treasonous. So is his pardoning of cronies, his obstruction of justice, his perversion of justice.

And none of it was necessary.

If he had dealt honestly with the virus openly, almost every political pundit in the country believes he could have won re-election easily. If he hadn’t treated his opponents as enemies, most of them would have just gone away, as critics of the powerful do.

What kind of leader pays porn stars hush money to cover up their fling and then runs for President, thinking it will never come out?

To me, the big story isn’t that we have lost our moral bearings; it’s that we are finding them.

The new America, the rising women, minorities, kids, brown and back and yellow, and yes, many white people seem quite a moral movement to me. They are rising in greater numbers than ever to make a moral statement about their country and how they feel about it.

Whatever happens tonight, the country will never be the same.

Sometimes you have to knock something over to pick it back up.

I’m certain it never occurred to Trump that this is, in fact, a moral country with many deeply held values and traditions.

He relished trampling on all of those traditions and values to the cheers of his adoring followers.

The thing I want to know about Donald Trump, who is increasingly being accused of trying to form a totalitarian government, is that so many of his cruelest and most controversial behaviors were in no way prompted by the necessity of one form or another.

One could easily argue that he and his government would have survived and won re-election if he had not committed such obvious crimes and transgressions and shocking acts of cruelty.

That, and his bungling of the pandemic, is why he smells of defeat tonight.

Trump rarely commits outright crimes – tampering with a federal election is getting closer and closer – but there is a pervasive feeling of lawlessness about his governance and his regime and the way he has enriched his family and their properties, among other things.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that under circumstances like the ones America is facing now, there might be considerably more required of democracy lovers than “an eye not blind and a heart not stony and corrupt to spot “unlawfulness.”

It often felt like Trump acts under conditions in which every moral act was illegal, and every legal action was a crime. His inverse view of morality – jeering at the disabled, sneering at Gold Star parents, egging on his supporters while they called for his opponents to be jailed, smearing and rejecting Dr. Fauci, the one person who could have helped to guide him through the pandemic while the death toll mounts.

The autocrat seeks to spread fear and flood the air with hatred for almost all kinds of opposition. People believe in the new order for the simple reason that that is the way things are now.

The country formally begins its new kind of revolution, so far a social and political one. May it stay that way.

It’s hard to say if Donald Trump was defeated, or if, for reasons not easy to know, defeated himself.

Politicians and journalists rarely traffic in morality, they are swept up in the moment. To me, this election is about personal responsibility. What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of government do I wish to have? What standards of right and wrong apply to our leaders? What moral values do we ask of ourselves and our leaders?

All of those questions are on the table tonight, for everybody to consider. I think that is necessary, as we are learning.