Trust me. Donald Trump doesn’t matter anymore. There is justice in the world; compassion and truth triumph in the end, just like Gandhi said.

President Trump is not living any longer; he is surviving, hanging on to lies for dear life, reading chapters in a book that no one but him has read or can follow.

We live in this Orwellian world.

Every day, we are told in blazing headlines and breathless commentary that something important is happening and that it is false and cannot possibly happen.

Then why I wonder, are we seeing it at all?

How are simple, rational people supposed to make sense of it when we are told again, and again it doesn’t matter?

Our democracy was bent but didn’t break. It is actually holding together very well. Leaders rise or fall on their moral authority. President Trump and his band of quislings have none.

The halls of congress echo with the howls of anguish and betray of the Founding Fathers. “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records, wrote Alexander Hamilton. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

The simple truth is that Donald Trump has failed in his assault on our country; no amount of lying boot lickers can obscure his failures vote after vote, court after court.

Our constitution has not been destroyed or shredded for all time; it was challenged by a disturbed and dishonest demagogue who has revealed himself to the world and turned almost all of his most loyal supporters against him, which is what he does and will always do.

The reason this won’t lead to chaos is that neither side can survive that.

In the Corporate nation, another year like this could be the goose that loses the golden egg. If they can do it to us – and they can’t – then we can do it do them. Nobody but the lawyers wins.

Lots of people have suffered under the mad reign of Donald Trump. But the people who pull the levers of power have not suffered and will not suffer. They hey have built the Corporate Nation and sustained it and defended it.

They have more to lose than the rest of us combined.

There is a simple reason our democracy will not be torn apart.

Why should it be? The one percent who have 40 percent of the wealth are happier and richer and more secure than ever. They lie to us to divide and weaken us, but the last thing they want is a system so dysfunctional and broken that it no longer works for them.

As long as we are at each other’s throats, we can’t come after them.

The great political achievement of extremist social conservatives in the last two decades has been to convince working-class rural white people that blacks and immigrants and poor people – and now, the mythical radical socialists –  are their enemies and their greatest threat.

One day they will awaken, perhaps, and see who their real allies are.

So long as they believe these lies, the country will be split into chunks, no single chunk big enough to overturn the apple cart.

Joe Biden and Rev. Warnock are about as radical as Mr. Rodgers. You can tell by the hopelessly dull way they both dress.

You don’t see Wall Street working to overturn the election. While much of the country struggles with the disease, eviction, unemployment, bitter divisions, and food insecurity, the Stock Market is having the ride of its life.

Anarchy and polarization are their enemies, not their friends.

Think about that for a bit before you sit up all night working about our endangered democracy. Mitch McConnell is horrified. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight is going too far. They are out of control, just like Mao’s Cultural Revolutionary warriors. They risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

So let them go. They don’t matter any longer, either.

This week, eleven senators will join 140 congressmen and women to challenge the electoral college ratification of Joe Biden. In a joint statement, they acknowledged their gesture’s futility, and it is good they came out into the open.

We all know who has joined the Benedict Arnold Party; they will not be forgotten.

In 18 days, Joe Biden will be President of the United States and Kamala Harris the vice-president. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

That’s about all anyone needs to know. Some people rise to the moment. Some people fall.  Donald Trump and his supporters remind us once again that there is no evidence of any kind to suggest the election was fraudulent.

These seditionist men and women will be held accountable in one way or another over time.

The people with real power laugh at Trump and shudder at his populist pretensions.  He knows it, and he hates them.

He’s showing his true feelings now because he thinks it doesn’t matter anymore. As he is learning this week, it does matter. Trump holds the demagogue’s power – cheering throngs in the streets, frayed nerves, gullible thugs ready to follow orders.

Real power isn’t out there in the streets; it is rarely seen in public and never in tweets. And it sure doesn’t come from white nationalist splinter groups in very diverse America.

The only people who believe Trump’s lies are the poor bastards who have been lied to and manipulated for generations. Like Senator Hawley, they’ve bet on the wrong Messiah. Just as Hawley and his sycophant congressmen and women have betrayed us, Trump will betray them and every single person around him.

It is what he does. It is what he can’t help but do. It’s the only thing he knows. There is absolutely no substance to his presidency other than disruption and intimidation.

Even as he bullies the Republican Party to support his mad fantasies – people of principle are always rare –  he is betraying them, putting their much needed Georgia victory at risk.

I argued with two good friends today for hours about whether Donald Trump deserves our empathy and even our sympathy. What a painful and very public way to fail.

They disagreed with me. I believe empathy is the highest level of aspiration for humanity; they argued that some people are too cruel to be forgiven.

One of them was a nurse who said she could not forgive Trump for the harm he has done to so many people and our country, but she would work hard to care for him if he were sick.

He is, she said, a sociopath.

I asked her if a sociopath came into her hospital with Covid-19, could she treat him with empathy. She said she hoped she could, she was sure she would.

To empathize is not to forgive or approve; it is to try to move beyond hatred and revenge and stand in the shoes of another. I argued that empathy has no meaning if it applies only to the people we like.

Why would a President in his right mind turn on the people in Georgia who have slavishly mimicked, praised, and supported him all through his presidency?

Because it’s what he does.

Since he can’t be loyal to anyone, no one except the Proud Boys and the Benedict Arnold Party will be loyal to him. He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.

And then, not even them. I look into Trump’s future and see Citizen Kane, another Mad and angry King locked up his castle, driven mad by failure and obscurity.

Empathy does not preclude punishment or justice. It just asks us to understand and feel some sorrow at the sorry state of humanity.

The people lining up to kiss Trump’s ring are just as self-destructive as he is. That is his mad and destructive genius. They know now what they do, and they know not what the world sees.

Trump has lost all relevance now.

To the virus. To the economy. To the people who are sick and hurting. To the doctors and nurses who need help. The legislation before Congress. To President-elect Biden and his administration.

To the governments of the world. To the billions of people fighting climate change and hatred.

For the first time in his presidency, Trump has achieved something thought to be impossible: he is pathetic.

There is no way Trump will run for office again or receive his party’s nomination again. Mitch McConnell and the real sharks who run the Corporate Nation have just heard their oven bells ring.

Trump is now ready and juicy to come out of the oven and get carved up.

It has already begun.

His Senate puppets and his precious right-wing judges have all denied him.

The most pliant and cowardly Senate in American history has rebuffed and humiliated him.

The tag “loser,” which is so unbearable to him, is embedded on his forehead and will be his epitaph. As the Greeks foresaw, Trump fell on the sword of his own hubris; he could never imagine his own invincibility.

The President not only looks pathetic and is pathetic. Even his lies no longer believe one another. His tweets are the raving chronicle of a broken, sick man.

Once they have someone else in the White House to obsess over, even the media, which has profited so much from President Trump, and is so co-dependent around him, will abandon him and turn away to the next thing.

They do it all the time.

So will his supporters. As they were so quick to abandon our Constitution and the fundamental principles, so will they turn on him; he is already last year’s big hit show.

We know all of his lines by heart. Poor me, he says every day to the poor and disheartened.

Netflix has more social media hits online than he does and much more relevant programming.

Trump is important only to the extent that we fear him and listen to him and invite him inside of our heads and inner spirits.

I wrote about him for several months and exchanged messages with his humorless and angry supporters every day. He doesn’t matter anymore, he can rant and whine and lie all he wants on January 6, it won’t change one single thing, except to cajole his battered followers into sending more donations.

At the end of that time of writing about him, I felt as if a black cloud had entered my soul and driven out all of the color and light, leaving only fear and anger behind.

That time is ending. I can listen to him if I wish, but there is really no reason for me to bother.

None of the sycophants desperate to please him can succeed him because they are not him.

You may notice, while scores of educated, elected, accomplished men and women fawn all over him and betray their country to defend him, that President Trump himself fawns over no one and is loyal to no one and pleases no one but himself.

That is the path he has chosen, it leads to nowhere.

Ambitious young men like Sen. Josh Hawley are just too green to see it, but they will learn the lesson that almost everyone around Trump learns sooner or later – no one can be the next Trump. There is only one, and he and fate have a rendezvous with destiny.

There is no one so loyal that they can’t be sacrificed at the drop of a tweet. Or throw themselves off of a bridge.

Trump is already gone in so many ways. He has no moral authority, no credibility, the civic and professional federal bureaucracy has turned almost completely against him. He has abandoned his job as President, just as the job has abandoned him.

Even the people answering his call to protest the election don’t believe him when he says it was stolen. Nobody but the Proud Boys believes him anymore.

Sadly for him, there aren’t enough of him.

Where does relevance come from? It comes from truth and power.

Trump has lost both.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.” – Thomas Paine