The conventional wisdom has been that Trump has severely damaged our democracy and is still trying.

The voices and messages from the 2020 campaign suggest he may have saved it.

You, sir, are no Hitler.

I’ve written as honestly and fairly as I could about what bothered me about Donald Trump and about the damage he has done in the bloody (and losing) battle for civility, cooperation, decency, and honesty in our public life.

I haven’t written much about what bothered me about Joe Biden, but Trump seemed to be the big story by far.  And Biden was pretty quiet. Like most reporters, I go where the blood and drama is.

“We are one country, divided by two parties,” wrote Mark Penn, chairman of Harris polls, about the recent election in the Wall Street Journal today.

“The nation is largely moderate, practical, physical, and driven by common sense over ideology. Most voters prefer compromises on health care, immigration, stimulus, and other thorny issues that the extremes of the parties have pushed to the limits.”

This is truth.

The liberals mostly went for Biden, conservatives mostly for Trump. Trump did worse in the suburbs and better with minorities than he did in 2016.

Chew on that for a while.

Many things reassured me about this election.

Trump’s erratic and cruel regime was rejected,  Biden will need to stay in the center for the government to accomplish anything.

So will Surrogate Republican co-President Mitch McConnell.

Only 24 percent of voters identified as liberal, while 38 percent say they’re conservative, according to CNN exit polls.

Another 18 percent say they are moderate. The percentage of self-identified liberals declined 2 points, the share of conservatives increased 3 points.

Somehow, Trump ended up solidifying and inspiring the middle. In the end, he didn’t knock the country off course; he shocked us into getting back on course.

That is not something I would have imagined could happen.

I set out on a different mission writing this column today.

I decided to write honestly and fairly about what was good about Donald Trump, drawing heavily on the many messages I have received from his supporters in recent months, some (about 20 percent) were both civil and thoughtful.

I decided to challenge myself to the exercise of going against my own grain, and that of many of my readers.  My job is to encourage people to think, not agree.

Thinking is about opening up, not pinning a label on yourself that can never change. I’m not too fond of red and blue dogma and knee-jerk arguments.

Recently, most of the e-mail I get from Trump people are incoherent rants about radical socialism, thieving Democrats,  Joe Biden’s alleged dementia, poor Hunter,  and his enslavement by the radical left and the dread bogeywoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In between are some thoughtful messages – sparkles I call them – from Trump supporters that make me think. I wish these people were as loud as the conspiracy theorists.

We are all sick of Trump, he’s like an old car radio turned full volume in the 1970s that can’t be turned off. Enough.

I’ve told myself a dozen times that if Trump wasn’t so cruel, didn’t lie so much, wasn’t an obvious sociopath, and was willing to talk coherently to people outside of his base; he could have been a successful, even great if extremely controversial President.

But those are pretty big ifs. I have to credit him with determination, look what he overcame for awhile.

I think, like all misfits and outliers,  he ended up doing a lot of good; much of it is unintentional perhaps, much despite himself, some of it instinctive.

I am not a big Joe Biden fan and am sorry that so many people make assumptions about me; that’s the price of labeling.

I don’t write to other people’s preconceptions of me, or submit to them; I favor my own.

To dislike Trump is not to worship Biden. I believe the election was, in many ways, a vote against both of them. To vote for Trump is not necessarily to love him either.

Reading through the exit polls, it what is clear that Americans want to stay in the middle.  They want the government to change, but not as much as Trump wanted to change it, or as abnormal a presence as he turned out to be.

They don’t want a sociopath in the White House, they don’t like rudeness and lies, they didn’t want an old old school and very traditional Democratic Party liberal to push the country to the left.

Anybody who wants to be President in 2024 had better stay in the middle lane.

In a democracy, you have to care a little bit about everybody, not just you and your fans. That was Trump’s crippling mistake with people like me; he never spoke to me or acted as if he was my President too. It wouldn’t have been that hard.

For a while there, the Democrats were willing to negotiate about immigration.

But Trump was in love with his own offensiveness. He confused heartlessness with courage, and it cost him the presidency.

He made immigration a clarion call for the extreme right and seemed determined to hurt as many people as possible, and the Democrats retreated to the far left.

There was no middle, even though it was obvious something had to be done about the border and the millions of illegals pouring into the country uncounted and unchecked.

No country can function like that forever; no country should respond as thoughtlessly and cruelly as Trump did.

The wall was a chimera, a joke, a boondoggle, a stunt, and a sham. Border security is something else. Trump never passed up a chance to be vicious when he might have been nicer.

I consider myself a middle citizen; I think the election has positioned the country to stay away from extremes. I’m either misreading it or another example of the system’s genius, an example of how it self-corrects.

Everybody won something, and everybody lost something. Nobody gets the total control they wanted.

The election, according to every poll I’ve seen, was a rejection of extremism. That is not bad news for democracy. I should add that the blockheads doping out on conspiracy theories have lost. Trump didn’t win; the election process that is the cornerstone of our democracy did.

This can only end in one way, with Trump gone in January. But this doesn’t mean that everything Trump tried to do was evil or awful.

Trump’s supporters wanted him to be a leader who was not a conventional politician. He delivered on that promise and then some. Clearly, the broad disenchantment with our political system was much deeper and more urgent than many of us realized.

But it shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was. That is on us.

Demagogues crop up with governments laying to people, and our government has been lying to us for a long time.

Both Republicans and Democrats have been corrupted by big money, and few people from either party seem to care much about ordinary people way from election time.

Income inequality has been epidemic. Lobbyists and billionaires run the government. They have corrupted our courts; there are no restraints on them. Many people loved Trump, but many more are craving a quieter, more businesslike, and well….sane President.

I like that Trump has been pulling us out of a series of wars that seemed to have no clear goal and no end in sight.

I understand there is great opposition to how he did it, but if any President came to office promising to end our eternal wars and then did it, I would vote for him or her in a flash.

There was a Quaker side of Trump; for all that people fear him, he seems to have no appetite for genocide or wars. He didn’t submit to the military-industrial complex, which has owned the Democrats and Republicans for years.

He was quite willing to dismiss and ignore the weapons makers, who always love war, as much as possible for as long as possible. A lot of American kids have died for that.

I don’t understand Trump’s fawning timidity towards dictators unless you buy the theory that he is still trying to please his dictatorial father.

But I thought there was something to his idea about talking to everybody rather than ignoring people we see as our enemies. Again, if this had been framed differently, if he wasn’t so obsequious, inconsistent, and fawning, this could have been an appealing approach for an outsider to take.

In 2016, voters wanted somebody who worked outside of the box. Trump did that. But his narcissism and monomania got away with him. People didn’t want to be the plumber he bullied and refused to pay.

Trump did something neither political party has been strong enough or smart enough to do.

He brought the immigration crisis to the forefront.

His consistent strategic mistake was in his cruelty, bluster, and refusal to communicate what he was doing or to win over skeptics.

His war on immigrants and their children detracted from the much larger point he was also trying to make – our borders are a mess, the system is out of control. He didn’t need to launch a terror campaign against Mexicans and undocumented workers to raise that issue or frame it as a matter of his stupid wall.

In every case, Trump took his most interesting ideas and present them in the worst possible way – I’m not saying I agree with them  – but I would wager he would be about to serve a second term if he wasn’t such an asshole.

In a business, a tycoon doesn’t have to tolerate dissent. A president in a democracy does. He never could.

To me, Washington has become an Imperial City. The President rides around in massive motorcades surrounded by scores of aides and guards.  He lives much more like a King than a democratic leader.

American Presidents are not supposed to be kings living in castles.

The upper levels of government also reek of clubby elitism –  ordinary people never make it to the highest levels of government.

The muck-a-mucks around in government cars with bodyguards and are far removed from the farmers and merchants who wrote the Constitution.

We were ripe for a populist revolution; we are lucky it hasn’t gone farther.

Biden expanded the Democratic lead among moderates to 30 points from 12 in 2016. Moderate men, not suburban women, swung the race to Biden. The white share of the vote declined from 71 percent to 67 percent, while Latinos grew from 11 percent to 13 percent.

The electorate was older, not younger, as the media first reported, there were fewer younger adults, and more than one in five people were over 65.

I give Trump credit for engaging Americans in their political process after decades of lethargy and indifference. Trump mattered, pro and con.

More people voted by far than have ever voted in a presidential election. Engagement is the thermometer of democracy, the way we take our temperature. In that way, we are suddenly a lot healthier, not worse off.

“Either side could have won a race decided by such small margins,” says Penn. “Mr. Trump failed to improve his character or tone down his rhetoric, and he went without developing a clear second-term agenda.

He should have taken a bipartisan approach to the pandemic and appointed a general, not a politician, to lead the effort. Instead, he made it a Republican effort, and he owned it. Those were big mistakes.”

The Biden campaign, said Penn, focused on character, but if character outweighed issues, Mr. Trump would have lost by 20 points.

“Democrats did win on the virus,” Penn wrote, “which was voters No.2 issue, and that’s likely what put Mr. Biden over the top. Voters made the rather sensible determination that while Mr. Trump might have done a good job with the economy, he did a bad one with the virus.”

And Trump did do a good job with the economy, tax cut for the rich and all. People were working and making more money. In America, that is the gold standard of any presidency.

Americans aren’t looking for spiritual meaning, they want good work and good wages.

It doesn’t matter that Obama started it. It matters what is happening now.

In our polarized country, it’s hard to get a dispassionate perspective on the truth. The people who message me about Biden being a senile radical left sound stupid and clueless.

Biden would be a lot more interesting if he were a radical socialist or even a socialist at all or demented.

Whatever he is or isn’t, he comes across as a decent and very traditional politician, not a boat rocker in any sense. He would be the last person to shut down the country again because of the pandemic, and he is the last person in the world to defund the police.

Reading the exit polls, I was thinking that instead of mumbling platitudes about racial justice and ducking the questions, he would have gotten ten million more votes if he had said what he was thinking:

The police don’t need to be defunded; they need a few billion dollars to retrain, learn de-escalation, and re-connect with the African American community.

That would have given him a landslide, but in this case, he was very much the politician people hated and mistrusted, the kind of politician they believe Trump isn’t.

It’s too bad that Trump’s honesty was so unabashedly racist. That’s another thing a president can’t do – shoot his mouth off without a filter.

I can’t call Trump honest, he lies way too much, but he does speak his mind a lot more directly than most politicians do.

I think people crave that in politicians; I think they loved Trump for that.

I am sorry to see Trump end his spectacular run in so pathetic and petulant away. He cannot turn this election around, the election is yet another sign of the middle holding.

I’m sorry to see him in so craven and small a way, I thought he had more pride than that. I thought his followers did also.

To list the good Trump has done is to qualify almost all of them, I couldn’t get away from that.

I’d also like to find more good than I did, but I am also happy to step back and re-think some of my own assumptions. I don’t have to be on one extreme or the other, as much pressure as we all are to think like that.

Good counts even if you didn’t mean it.

The real message of the votes in 2020 is not one of division and grievance. that is the media version of America, where the loudest and dumbest get to speak the most.

The real message is that they are more centrist in nature and outlook and that a president who governs to the right or left is likely to be left behind in the next election.

I’m happy to be a man of the middle in a country of the middle.