“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship Of The Rings.

He is loud and angry and hurt, like a wounded bear, trapped in his tree by dogs and hunters. A part of me feels his pain; most of me is already saying goodbye.

It feels like a kind of death, oddly enough.

(Note to the worriers: Please don’t bother sending me those messages which begin, “yes, but I’m worried that he’s still here and think what he can do..” I know all that; it’s just not the way I think, or hopefully, will ever think.)

I understand he will be a presence in our lives for a long time, and most of the time, he chooses to be a toxic one.

But he is the kind of bully and demagogue that is well known to history; when they lose their power, they lose their magic.

I’ve never known a playground bully to grow up and be happy. They can go on flopping for a long time, like snakes with no heads.

Somehow, their lives turn to jelly when they are no longer nasty children and no one is paying attention. No one fears them anymore, especially the people with real power.

Soon enough, he’ll be the Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) of politics, the over-the-hill old man shouting at kids on bikes, afraid to be seen without his orange hair nest.

All the money and tweeting and MAGA heads on the earth can’t change a whit of that, history is so much bigger than him or me or you (or those grim young me waving their big flags and their big you-know-whats and racing around in their big trucks and bloated boats.)

Like every other spoiled brat with no boundaries, Trump thinks he will really show us this time but think about Elizabeth Taylor when she grew older. She couldn’t bear to be seen at all.

Fame is tough that way; when you lose it, you lose all that matters to you.

Corinthians 15:55: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is our sting?

I know I will be writing about him now and then, and I know he will do anything possible to keep the world’s attention focused on him. The last month will be a mess.

But I’m already losing interest, feeling differently.

Like the awful pandemic, which he can’t grasp or empathize with, he is slipping away from us. I feel more pity for him than anger, and I hope that is a feeling that spreads.

He’s sparked enough hating and grievance; perhaps it’s time to try and obsess on something else.

When I think of Trump, I think of the brats I knew on the middle-school playground, always bullying the weak, harassing the girls, doing anything they could think of to get and keep attention.

Trump’s real problem – his own mythologizing can’t hide it any longer – is that he was never very popular. As of Nov. 3, his job approval rating was just 44.6 percent, and his disapproval rating was 52.6 percent.

As I wrote until I was blue, you can’t win a national election that way.  And he wasn’t interested in being any more likeable.

While most Republicans did well in the election,  Trump’s failure stood out: he became his worst nightmare, a loser.

And being a loser is not the same thing as winning, especially when you have nowhere to go but a gawdy old Mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

Palm Beach is the nesting ground of rich old people with tanning machines, not global power brokers.

In one of the Harry Potter books, I remember Harry praising death:
“Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak,” claimed Harry, “so he can sneak up on people. Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking…

Trump has one of those Invisibility Cloaks; he hides the worst parts of himself. – bankruptcies, lies, sexual predation, taxes, porn stars.

He is fond of flapping his arms and shrieking.” But he will learn soon enough that life always follows death and defines it.

He killed something good in our country, and I have the sense it will soon begin recovering. It is in our nature to heal from pain and suffering, given a chance.

Trump is a mystic and a magician, but he needs real power to do his magic.

He’s just another nasty old man who leers at young women and has that awful nest on his head without it. He makes a fool out of himself, day in and day out.

He is morphing from the Mad King to Trump Dethroned.

I learned to ignore the playground bullies; I’m learning subconsciously to ignore him; there is only so much the human psyche can take, and that, for all his TV skills and drama and posturing, will do him in.

I’ve had enough.

I haven’t abandoned him; he is too interesting for that, and I’m too opportunistic.

But it isn’t the same already, and he isn’t even gone yet. I hope he and Rudy Guiliana make a movie together. I will miss them both.

My dogs and the donkeys are now getting five times as many likes and shares as Trump, which is the opposite of what happened all summer. The universe is righting itself.

I am happy to be focusing on my life and my farm and the animals again. It feels right.

No one could quite figure out how to deal with Donald Trump, although I have to say Joe Biden makes him and his supporters look smaller by the day just by existing.

Isn’t that a surprise?

For all of his noise and bluster, the world already feels a tad more peaceful and safe and decent.  The adults have returned to the school and are halting the chaos and mayhem.

It’s like learning to breathe normally after a marathon.

A good friend who was nearly undone by Trump e-mailed me and said he was sleeping well for the first time in four years. “And he’s not even gone,” he rushed to add, fearfully, as if he were superstitious about feeling good.

I read him Gandolf’s wise quote, and I said I wish this year had not happened in my time, but that is not for me to decide. All I can have to decide is what to do with the time given to me.

Trump is getting too predictable, too small, and too selfish to warrant too much of my time. I’ll leave him mostly to the fates.

I’m too old to invest much more in Donald Trump, either in my heart or on my blog. I know I’m not done with him, but now, he reminds me of Godzilla, stung by all those rockets and bombs, hurrying back into the ocean, fallen buildings, and shocked and frightened people as far back as anyone could see.

If people want to follow him into the abyss, that’s their business, not mine. They will have to figure out how to get healthy again all by themselves, as do we.

Still, there is something poignant about Trump and his plight. He wants it too badly; something powerful people are careful never to show.

It is, for those of us who have lived through it, a kind of death.

Henry Ward Beecher wrote that death is the dropping of the flower so that the fruit may swell.

It’s time for me to swell.