Life is full of beginnings; I told Donald Trump when he invited me to the White House for some tea and a chat.

The place was spooky, like those World War II movies where the German officers were hurriedly burning folders and records, and everybody was frantically packing up their belongings and hiding their treasures before the Allies arrived.

It turns out that the President is a regular reader of my blog, and he wanted me to come and see him and offer some advice about the rebirth he will soon be undertaking – a new beginning –  a process I have often written about.

You are bad at beginnings, Mr. President; I volunteered, and as a result, your endings are not what they ought to be.  You have a genius for turning gold into straw. The vaccine is a great example.

Today is a momentous new beginning for your administration and our country – the vaccines are flowing out to people, and you had a lot to do with that. Normalcy is insight. 

Congratulations, but shouldn’t this be a day of celebration and coming together? It isn’t. It’s another day of anger and grievance and lament because you have no idea what a real beginning is like.

Instead, you tweet all day about what a great job you have done and how you have been ignored and persecuted.  I don’t want to be pissed off at you today for being obnoxious; I want to feel happy that next year maybe so much better than 2020.

Didn’t anyone tell you don’t have to keep telling us how great you are today? Why not let the vaccines speak for themselves.

The vaccines’ shipment marks an important new beginning for America, which is even more important than you and your feelings.

I notice that you keep blowing beginnings, I said.

Every time you have one, you say something stupid and offensive, and your beginning gets ruined, turned into something divisive and disheartening. People who might be happy to applaud you are instead of rushing into the bathroom to vomit.

We should all be happy today as the first vaccines are shipped. This is your big moment, maybe your biggest. It would help if you were dancing on the South Lawn of the White House, I said. Nobody is happy. Your followers are enraged, gobbling up all your conspiracy theories about the election, your detractors are angry and outraged about your assault on our democracy.

Your wife is packing up the White House, your staff is quitting, you’re raking in tens of millions of dollars for doing nothing much, and you might want to focus a bit on your own new beginning.

And all you do is bitch and whine.

It could be a great thing for you, ranting on a radio show, screwing up the Republican Party, tweeting all day and night at your own San Simeon.

But here again, you’ve screwed up your biggest ever beginning – the post-Covid-19 era.  And you’ve messed up the other new beginnings you have begun in your presidency, many important and successful. It’s a pattern that may help explain your humiliating and unacknowledged defeat.

You’ve launched important beginnings; I told him:  a new understanding of trade deals, which have harmed so many Americans. You’ve begun a new era in peace – for the first time in decades; we are not at war. You began a new era in the Middle East. You’ve sliced through arcane and bureaucratic blocs to getting anything done in Washington, a new beginning for bureaucracy.

You’ve delivered on Warp Speed.

You get points for doing things, I told him, not for bragging about things. That’s what new beginnings are for.

We learn that you’re somewhat unbalanced, but I’ve also read that many “successful” sociopaths can be charming and popular for long periods of time. You seem to skip that part. Any Broadway hoofer could tell you that your openings really suck.

It turns out Trump is a regular reader of my blog, and he wanted me to come and see him and offer some advice about the rebirth he will soon be undertaking, a process I have often written about. I was honest; I told him I thought one of his big problems was that he didn’t know how to deal with beginnings. 

He said he liked my thinking; he especially likes the way I come across on TV. Oops, I said, wrong Katz, nobody would put me on TV.

I would have left peacefully, I shouted over my shoulder as the guards led me outside.

I started to tell him more of what I thought, but he pushed a button, and some aides came rushing in to haul me outside and throw me off the White House grounds.

So I’ll write about it here on the blog; I’m sure he will read it in the morning, in between tweets.

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I was quite sincere about beginnings in my advice to the President.

Beginnings happen every day and every hour to every person on the earth. In the material world, almost everything proceeds from small beginnings, from rivers to inventions to skyscrapers, big bridges, and great paintings.

Beginnings shape my life, and the more aware I am of their importance, the better I can manage and think about them. In a way, beginnings define all of our lives, measure them,  make up the thread of life.

Donald Trump is lousy at beginnings, which often translate into bitterness and disappointment for him and his followers, and his many critics.

The puzzling thing to me is that he is a kind of cultural alchemist; he turns good things into bad almost effortlessly and squanders the many new beginnings he has to regurgitate his long list of failures.  But he never seems to turn the bad into good.

The vaccines on their way to people got me thinking about his successes, and he did have some. But every one of them was obscured and befogged in a cloud of rage, cruelty, and braggadocio.

I treasure every single beginning.

A beginning is a cause, and as such, it must be followed by growth, change, humility, and determination. I try to awaken to the significance of each beginning.  It’s really about character.

Beginnings reveal our strengths and our flaws.

When I do something good, I am quick to share it with my readers. But I would never dream of saying, “Hey, I really did good today. Pay attention to me!” They wouldn’t like it. Neither would I. Good works speak for themselves, or not at all.

And I’m just as crazy as you are, Mr. President,  but c’mon man, as Joe Biden likes to say, there’s no need to keep shooting yourself in the foot; there are plenty of people out there who would happily do that for you. You keep pissing away your great beginnings.

A beginning is a gate, and a gate leads to a path, and the path to a particular destination, so a considered beginning can lead to good results, and results lead to completion.

As the President is learning as he approaches the completion of his first term,  there are right beginnings and wrong beginnings. By thought and humility, you can avoid wrong beginnings, make the right beginnings, and thus escape bad outcomes.

Some beginnings – Pearl Harbor, the pandemic – cannot be controlled. But the announcement and distribution of a vaccine that could save hundreds of thousands of lives could be controlled, and he blew it.

Instead of telling us how he will distribute the vaccines,  he spent the weekend raging at Attorney General William Barr on Twitter instead of focusing on saving American lives amid a deadly surge in coronavirus cases.

President Trump reminded us again of one of the truisms about how he has regarded his allies both in business and politics. Everyone is expendable if they do not follow his dictates. What he meant to say, I’m sure, was how great that the vaccines are being shipped faster than anyone imagined.

I focus my energies instead on those beginnings over which I have complete control. They are found in the realm of my own thoughts and thinking and actions, in my attitude and thoughts and activities through which I pass every day.

In other words, in my life, as I make it, which is my world of good or evil.

During my visit to the White House, I was prepared for the President to ask me how he might have introduced his new and historic vaccine.

I was dragged out of the White House before I could tell him all this. I was going to urge him to try something like this.

“First, I want to announce the launch of our vaccines in honor of those many victims of Covid-19 and to the heroes who helped so many and saved so many others.  I want to thank the doctors and scientists and corporate executives and Pentagon officials who made Warp Speed work – we are grateful forever for their skill and dedication and cannot possibly thank them enough. I declare this day, Sunday, December 10, a national holiday; we have people to mourn and heroes to honor.

We will honor our heroes with a parade on Pennsylvania Avenue and our lost Americans with a special memorial at the Washington Monument.

We will fight tooth and nail for a coronavirus relief-bill to help the many businessmen, service workers, and ordinary Americans who are hurting so badly. We hear you and will do everything we can to help you.

This is a new beginning and a momentous one for all of our people.  I rejoice with all of you. We hope and pray it is the beginning of a new era of coming together in a great common purpose – to put this awful pandemic behind us and recover our spirit and glory as of the greatest nation on earth. Today, I am proud to be an American.”

Mr. President, I think you might get the praise and attention you crave so badly if you treated your beginnings more respectfully.

You might even have gotten re-elected.

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P.S. The polling website 538 reports that early polling shows both Democrat Senatorial Candidates leading their Republican opponents by narrow margins a little under a month from the unprecedented runoff election, which will determine which political party will control the Senate.