“The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. — Daniel Webster.

This weekend, President Trump reminded us that his true genius is creating alternate realities that transfix the media, thrill his supporters, and keep his name in the news.

His true legacy, his real genius, is his narcissism, his manic ability to not only be in the news but to be the news. Even when he isn’t.

For those who wish to imagine life beyond him, this is essential to understanding what is happening now and what comes next.

Beyond that, the President is all hot air and cotton candy. His nasty tweets accomplish nothing much and mean little, less by the day.

I dream sometimes of the good a President’s blog might do if were used for helping people rather than attacking them. That’s a lot of gift cards and food.

You might or might not know that Joe Biden is assembling a new administration that will impact Americans much more than Donald Trump in the coming years.  Politics is life and death right now, for citizens, for the economy.

That doesn’t get nearly as much attention as a rejected President, flailing for relevance in his fading reign.

If you follow most of our mass media, you might believe all those stories about Trump having won-re-election in November. If you don’t know, he lost.

This is Donald Trump’s story – that he always manages to be the big story, even when he is no longer really the story at all. Or if his story is completely false.  Our choice is whether to swallow this fantasy or jump in, enabling his desperate need for attention.

Trump isn’t likely to give up his moment in the sun voluntarily, and neither is most of the media likely to give up on him, not while he’s still in the White House.

They are raking in billions of dollars and many millions of followers taking – now gorging on – the bait every single time.

To understand Donald Trump’s iteration, just remember the motto of his celebrity origin story, the TV reality show.

Think of Survivor, whose motto is Outwit, Outplay, Outlast.

That motto should be engraved in the new Donald Trump Presidential Library, the fitting and perhaps ultimate fate of a golf course near Mar-a-Largo.

The show gathers contestants in tribes.

The tribe that wins an “immunity challenge” (think pardon) temporarily staves off elimination. In contrast, the losing tribe gets to attend a “tribal council” (electoral college) where the show’s host at the end of each episode gets to oust one of its members from the show through a secret vote.

Beware of underestimating this troubled man, but be even more frightened of taking him too seriously.  That’s his fuel. Our deepest fears can too often become our greatest reality, however unfounded.

Trump is unique, unprecedented. It’s hard to think of any other political leader emerging who is anything like him. Just picture the hair alone.

I e-mailed a reporter friend of mine in Washington yesterday, we used to work together, and now he reports for the New York Times.

What about this bill that Trump isn’t signing? Did I ask?

“Of course, Trump was going to sign the bill,” he said. “His predictability is that he will always pretend to be unpredictable. But he isn’t.  He knows how to be on the front page. There is no way he was going to veto that bill. He would have torpedoed Georgia, enraged Mitch McConnell, the only person he really fears, and turned much of the Republican Party against him. He’s a carnival barker, a Ring Master. He’s the greatest circus in town.”

I asked him why he or his paper didn’t write that, but we were e-mailing each other, and he didn’t answer.

He didn’t need to answer.

The  New York Times had about seven million more online subscribers in 2020 than it had in 2015. There was more revenue from online readers than from its print subscribers.  Fox News has never made more money, and CNN has never had better ratings. The Washington Post has hired scores of new reporters for the first time in years.

Enemies, my ass, they are lovers and best friends.

Why would anyone think the media will move on a second sooner than they absolutely have to? The modern media and Donald Trump are not enemies; they are incest survivors,  bound to the hip.

Those stories about the people dying from the pandemic keep moving farther and farther down the page and later on the broadcasts. Jefferson said that in a democracy, the people get the leader they deserve.

Ouch. Don’t cast any stones.

The last few days were not a national political crisis. They were the appearance of one. They were the 2020 edition of Survivors. We are the survivors in this show.

Everyone knew their roles. The reporters sounded the alarm. The politicians wrung their hands and issues statements. The real people in pain and suffering got terrified and screwed, as always happens.

This left me wondering about life after Trump. Will it always be like this? How can we imagine tomorrow and be sane today?

I think that hope is a discipline, and I have exercised this discipline almost every day of the past four years. What seems obvious truth to me seems like the end of our world to much of the country.

Trump, said a neighbor, is like a big old stag shot but not killed. He may stagger around in madness and pain for days, but there’s no stopping his fall.

Trump is a lot less powerful and dominant than he would like you to think, or than they would like you to think to keep you watching and on the hook. You don’t need to take my word for it; just read between some of the lines.

This does make sense when you think about it.

Trump was elected to disrupt things, and every time he does, his base loves him all the more, even if they are cutting their own throats in doing so. Most people don’t want everything disrupted, they just want real change. We’ll see if anyone brings some.

As long as he is setting fire to Congress and Washington, Trump is a hero. They love Trump, but they hate the government more.

Trump is doing what they asked him to do, even more than they thought he might,  and what he promised them he would do. The rest of us are bleacher fans; we have the cheap tickets way up in the bad seats, watching in horror as the game keeps getting away from us.

But the problem with demagogues is that they can only disrupt, they can’t really lead or govern. Joe McCarthy, to whom Trump is often compared, went on and on until he just didn’t.

People got sick of him.

Much of the world doesn’t understand that Jerry Springer, the big daddy of reality of TV, is the true father of our country in 2020. He is the John Adams of Trumpism, the ghostly inspiration of the Trump Show.

Springer started his talk show in 1991 to mimic the look and format of the Phil Donahue Show. It was a politically oriented talk show at first, guests included Oliver North and Jesse Jackson, and topics included homelessness and gun violence.

In 1994, Springer, a former political reporter, and lawyer had the brilliant inspiration that changed television, and eventually, our national politics.

The show became an electronic tabloid geared towards tabloidish sensationalism. Guests were people confronted live on TV by a spouse or family member’s adultery, homosexuality prostitution, transvestitism, hate group members.

TV standards of accuracy, dignity, propriety, and convention went out of the window. Springer was a brilliant disrupter – of TV – spawning a generation of shows that kept raising the bar for violence, outrage, and irresponsibility.

His confrontations were often promoted by scripted shouting, violence on stage, or outrages that seemed to have any limits no longer.

Looking back at these shows (I did that yesterday), I saw a preview of The Tabloid Presidency, the toxic mix Trump has brought to the White House and to American politics.

Like Springer, the show fed off of outrage and grievance; the crowds drew ever more bloodthirsty and angry.  The bar kept rising for cruelty and crudeness. The audience screamed for blood and rage.

The show also ran for four years.

I could see foreshowings in the show of some of Trump’s followers – his audience was angry, judgmental, a mob more than a slice of Disney’s Americans. They were not happy.

Springer’s format is all over Trump’s TV appearances – at the podium, or in the White House driveway, where meek reporters shouted questions he didn’t need to answer and usually didn’t. Lousy governing, maybe, but great TV.

Trump knew what he was doing.

Will it be different in 2021? I believe so. It will almost certainly be different. Springer was successful, but not really powerful. That is Trump’s fate in the coming weeks.

The Republican Party rebellion has already begun.

There was much breathless and despairing reporting this week about a new Gallup Poll showing that 57 percent of all Republicans want Trump to run for President again in 2024. The stories were meant to frighten us, but what seemed important to me was that almost half of all Republicans already don’t want him to run again in 2014, and he hasn’t even left office yet.

The next show on the American Survivor  Trump special is the presidential election’s congressional certification, coming up in January. Even though there is no legal or legislative way that the election can now be overturned, only occasionally mentioned in the growing worry about what might happen, Trump is going forward.

He only needs a handful of Republican butt-suckers to turn the process into a two-day circus. Expect it, and know that it will fail.

Once again, the focus will not be on our new national government or the hideous problems it faces, but on the one person who will have nothing to do with solving them.

Mitch McConnell has already said the Senate won’t support the effort to overturn a legal election,  and the Democrats control the House of Representatives, so there is no chance of it happening.

We all saw over the weekend what most of us knew about the stimulus bill: it had to be signed. The election has to be ratified. It is great for Trump to seem to be a rebel to keep the Proud Boys riding, but since he is good only at disruption and not administration, it just won’t happen.

If the Tea Party had any mojo or values left, they’d be shrieking about the waste of all this taxpayer money.

The final challenge to the election will draw more money for him, solidity his self-created image as a fierce fighter to the end, and boost the ratings of the next interaction reality show appearance, wherever it is.

His plan is to be seen as the friend of the working men and women who have fought so hard for him, but for whom he has done nothing. As Daniel Webster said so insightfully, politics in America right now is governed more by the appearance of reality than reality itself.

How easy it is to forget that Trump was defeated, even though you might not know it if you spend much time reading and watching the news media. Six months ago, no pundit thought that possible.

You might not have noticed that Mitch McConnell challenged President Trump quite openly when he declared Joe Biden the winner, and he still seems to be the most powerful Republican in Washington. Trump is neither infallible nor invincible. He and McConnell are at odds now over legislation as well as the election.

Watch this one, McConnell is a lot smarter than Trump, and just as mean.

If not for his quisling supporters in the Republican Party, Trump’s blunders and outrages would have sunk him in a minute. And without any courageous people around him, the blunders are getting dumber and failing.

That support is breaking apart. This is what happens when a fruitcake like Rudy Guiliani becomes your most trusted adviser. All the grownups are gone.

You might not have noticed that more than 50 federal court judges, many appointed by Trump himself, refused to halt or block a single state election tally. Or that a significant majority of Republicans in Congress defied him to veto legislation that he insisted he wouldn’t sign.

Or that hundreds, if not thousands of  Republican vote-counters did their job and followed the constitution, not somebody’s erratic tweets. Those are not victories.

I’m not sure anxious progressives can tell the difference.

Lots of people in my life have suggested that I’m crazy, and there is a lot of evidence to support that.

But from my somewhat remote perch on a farm in upstate New York, it seems that in the past month or so, Trump has suffered nothing but defeats, one after the other, each more humiliating and damaging than the first.

Why, then, does he seem more powerful and newsworthy than ever? Because it’s a fantasy. It isn’t the truth. It is a myth that is already collapsing. It’s a money-making story nobody wants to drop.

Does he have to burn Mar-a-Largo down to draw some pity and recognition as a loser? In Trump’s world, losing is now winning, obscurity is fame; the truth is an ancient myth.

And yes, we are all complicit, all of us, the politicians, the media, the poor and traumatized people who can’t stop watching.

In one way, Trump is as successful as ever.

He can still suck up all the attention in the world, even though he has little power and a stunning and growing list of enemies, setbacks, and opponents.

Politics is at its simplest about common sense and survival.

There is no way all those bloodthirsty and ambitious young Republican senators and Congress members are going to give up their ambitions for the next decade and beyond just because Donald Trump would like them to.

In politics, today’s’ coward is tomorrow’s governor or President. They can switch masks pretty quickly. And one symbol of the professional politician is the knife in the back.

If they have to kidnap Trump in the night and drag him off to Guantanomo Bay, they will not let him run for office again in 2024. Nor is he likely to want to.

If I were Trump blocking the paths of all these young and ambitious sharks, I’d want a lot more guards around.

We are not Disney Imagineers.

No pundit I know of predicted 2016 or 2020 or November 3, 2020. The future is now knowable. I can imagine a new kind of politician rising to take Trump’s populist place; he or she doesn’t have to come from the Republican Party.

I can imagine Joe Biden knocking out the coronavirus by getting the government to help; I can imagine an economy in recovery, or Kamala Harris leading women to another progressive charge at a warmer and more gentle country.

I can imagine America calming down without a leader who arouses them daily. I can imagine the FBI going after white nationalists all over the country, as they did with the KKK, the Communist Party, and anarchists and socialists, and civil rights groups for generations.

They know how to do it if they decide to do it. The very dumb white nationalist kidnappers in Michigan made it easy.

Trump could easily get ensnared in lawsuits and accusations that siphoned his money and his energy. He might have a heart attack or stroke or simply bore people with the same very predictable act.

We can’t predict the future, but we can control what we imagine to be the future. I imagine a lot of conflicts, a lot of arguments, a lot of trouble. But I also imagine people rediscovering a government that actually helps people and does some good.

That in itself could transform our sorry and very ugly paralysis in Washington.

Trump has done such a  relentless job of painting Biden as senile, demented, and corrupt that he almost has to be better than many people expect. That could change the political dynamic as well.

The Democrats have many interesting younger people moving up the line, many of them charismatic women and leaders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and  Stacey Abrams are both pretty charismatic people and fund-raisers with huge followings.

Trump’s rabid attack on “radical socialism” has turned Oocasio’s squad into the Democratic Party’s most powerful fund-raisers. They will be making a lot of noise.

It is clear that Trump hated the job ever since he took it; all he really does is try to abuse the office and demean it. Why would he want to risk losing again? Remember, he was defeated, not victorious.

The next few months are important for the country and those who care about the country. The media reminds us daily that Trump golfs while the pandemic rages.

That’s something I don’t need to be reminded of. I will do everything in my power to help the people who get sick, the elderly who are threatened—the refugees in desperate need of support.

Donald Trump is no threat to me, not in the way many would have me believe. A Jewish friend told me he was terrified that Trump’s rise and the threat of a new Nazism coming to America.

He said I was just in denial when I wrote that he is no Hitler. I understand that this is a very valid concern for Jewish people.

I told him that if he stepped back and gathered perspective, he would see that the last weeks’ events clarify the idea that Trump is no Hitler, and the Proud Boys are no Storm Troopers.

If you pay attention to what those white nationalist buffoons hunting for the phantom demons of the Antifa,  and tearing down signs in front of churches, you might first think you were watching a Saturday Night spoof. Upsetting, sure, and outrageous.

But also ridiculous.

Be careful what you pay too much attention to. The media won’t help you make good choices. Hope and perspective really are disciplines.

When Hitler got rolling, he suffered very few of the kinds of defeats Donald Trump suffers almost every time he opens his mouth or makes a decision.  Remember Tulsa!

The pandemic was his biggest defeat, the election, his next, his post-election campaign even bigger and more spectacular.

Hitler wouldn’t have tweeted insults at his opponents; he just would have killed them all. Trump isn’t competent or hard-working enough for genocide; remember that Clorox press conference.

Send in the clowns.

The country did not fold under Trump’s oppressive weight, far from it. The center held for all of our divisions and partisan conflicts, and Donald Trump has not won a single victory in a very long time. I guess Mexico won’t be paying for that wall.

That does not bode well for his future.

Progressives in politics have a deeply ingrained habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  If Trump has taught us nothing else, he taught us that Presidents are powerful, perhaps too powerful.

Biden can accomplish a great deal no matter what the Republicans do.

Nobody likes to be bullied, and nobody likes a bully. That is the signal the members of Trump’s own party are giving out. Right now, Trump seems to have all the power. Once they smell blood – there is always blood – those loyal supporters will be at his throat.

I will skip this circus’s next appearance in January when he launches his long trumpeted reality show. It is simply another Tulsa, another hole for Trump to step in. He will make a lot of noise and scare a lot of people. That is what he does.

Will Trump’s version of American Survivors survive his post-presidential life? Probably in some form. Jerry Springer presided over nearly 4,000 episodes of his infamous and wildly dishonest daytime talk show across 27 seasons.

Trump’s increasingly undeniable craziness now stems from his dread of seeming to be a loser. But he is a loser, again and again, and again. Some lies won’t hold up for too long, even in strife-torn America.

We may be loud and obnoxious, but we are determined to be free.

This is not a winner; this is a man represented by Rudy Guiliani, who shows up at press conferences with his hair dye dripping down his cheek.

This is a man knocked down by his own Supreme Court justices, and his most fanatic and reliable supporters – Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Newsmax, and Fox News – have affirmed what the rest of us have known – he is a loser.

Donald Trump is struggling.

“His problem is that he has grown up with vulnerability in terms of his self-worth, self-esteem, and a clear sense of himself,” said Mark Smaller, a past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, told Politico. “Somebody with these kinds of vulnerabilities, affirmation, being the center of things is never enough. Because you can’t solve these old wounds, these old narcissistic wounds –  you cannot solve them with affirmation, with being at the center of things. You can’t because they persist so that you need more attention, you need more affirmation,  you need to be more at the center of things, all the time, more often. And when realities start to interfere with getting that kind of affirmation, you want more.”

This is bad news and a grim prediction for a defeated President heading off to live on a golf course and dining resort in Palm Beach, Florida, awaiting a whole lot of revelations and trials.

So much of the attention he draws comes from being the most powerful political leader in the world. Without power, the attention usually fades.

One can’t imagine Trump next year as the Trump we know now. Everything about him and around him will be different.

But I will recall that this final assault on our democracy is the last scheduled show of this circus and good riddance to it. More than 80 million Americans voted to skip the circus altogether, and it will have to leave town and set up somewhere again.

Whatever it is, it just won’t be the same.

Last week, I stayed in a beautiful old inn in Vermont, I was excited to learn that I was in the room that Daniel Webster often slept in, on his way from Vermont to Washington.

It was a privilege for me to stay in that room. Webster,of course, gets the last word:

“I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.”

– Daniel Webster.