One particular encounter stuck in my mind watching the insurrection in Washington yesterday afternoon, the first of my lifetime; a CNN reporter was referring to the “rioters” that attacked the capitol building.

One of the rioters was waving a huge flag, and he came rushing over to the reporter who he could hear talking; he appeared shocked and upset and said almost pleadingly: “we are not rioters. We are patriots.”

He was stunned to be called a “rioter.” And hurt.

Many of the other “protesters” in earshot of reporters heard the same thing. Some went and trashed some media broadcasting equipment, others cursed while the reporters spoke into microphones.

I was reminded that these people had no reason to believe that what they were doing was not patriotic; they were, in fact, convinced they were saving the country, saving the election, preventing a horrible injustice, taking back their stolen election, fighting for their champion, as he has fought for them.

I struggled to fathom how any rational being in America could believe the election was stolen, where no real evidence of any kind was approved by any court.

I remembered that there are at least two Americas right now. In that America, we live in at least two completely different realities, with different sets of truths.

The outside world, on the other hand, the fact-driven one, was horrified, by the images pouring out of the capitol, they were outraged. The U.S. capitol had never been breached since the War of 1812.  It was a violation, a desecration, a profound shock to the system.

To the protesters – I thought “terrorists” was strong –  it was the battle of Lexington and Concord. My sense was that the protesters expected to be praised, even revered.

I shook my head in wonder, I could not begin to comprehend their reasoning, or their justifying the horror of Tuesday at the capitol, this crude yet savage attack on our democracy.

We are so many miles apart.

But shocking as yesterday was, it’s important to keep perspective.

Democracy is fighting back hard. The center is holding, getting stronger every day. Trump has failed in every single thing he has tried to do to steal this election and destroy the truth.

Trump’s attempted coup has failed, an army of judges, poll workers,  Republicans and Democrats, and state and local officials,  have preserved it.

Democracy means something to us, for all of our quarrels.

We are all getting a lesson in the fundamentals of democracy. We are all learning to care.

The Democrats will control the Senate.

And Joe Biden will be President of the United States, he will be confirmed either tonight or by tomorrow. Kamala Harris will be vice-president. Trump failed to stop them.

The cynical and transparently false debates – fund-raising opportunities for ambitious young politicians, –  will go on for as long as it takes, but the result will be the same.

On a normal day, this would all be a cause for many people to celebrate. Donald Trump will not let that happen, not yet. But our democracy is more than holding its own.

The campaign to overturn the election is collapsing, in part a gift from the “patriots” who attacked the soul of the American experience. Talk about a wake-up call.

It was inevitable in so many ways that the two radically different realities that have torn America apart, encouraged by our Mad and lost President, would collide.

They collided Tuesday at the capitol, with a big bang.

Normally, the two realities have nothing to do with one another; we live in two radically different worlds, not the same one.

This time, the two worlds met head-on, they are interacting on many different levels.

The rioters had no idea that Joe Biden won the election or that it wasn’t stolen. They really didn’t.

As they violently and frighteningly attacked the heart of our government,  egged on by our supposed leader, the people trashing the capital and threatening the legislators were sure they were saving and protecting it. They had the air of people leaving a winning baseball game, or attending a successful class reunion.

They didn’t look like terrorists, most of them, they seemed to feel good about themselves, blissfully unaware of how many people would soon hate them and their cause.

They didn’t seem like martyrs. There were the bands of creepy-looking young men, Trump’s Storm Troopers, white nationalists, and trollers. They looked like they needed trouble, and many found it.

But there were lots of ordinary people, trekking to Washington to do good, just as Martin Luther King’s many followers did in 1963. I guess the truth is personal.

I knew things had changed when even the Senate’s bloodless and canniest ghoul, Mitch McConnell, was talking like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, worried about our democratic values and traditions.

The Republicans might hate socialists, but they also hate goons bursting into the Senate and House chambers, tearing through their desks, smashing windows with fishing poles,  and peeing and defecating in the hallways.

They seemed well equipped to break things, more than a few had guns.

Trump’s followers might be loyal, but they do not live in grace.

The images from the capital were horrifying at first, then riveting, then fascinating.

But Democracy is not nearly over in America.  A lot of us learned that. That’s good news. And Georgia provided more good news. Maybe some good will get done.

It is almost impossible at the moment to feel much empathy for the people who terrorized the capital yesterday.

I saw in the protestors – rioters is accurate –  what are perhaps the ultimate American victims of  Trump and Trumpism. Lots of calculating and cynical people have gone to work for Trump, knowing it would end badly, but willing to sacrifice themselves for some fame and maybe a book contract.

They knew what they were doing.

The “protesters” I saw and heard on TV yesterday had absolutely no idea what they were doing or how much Trump has misled and betrayed them. Their media is ignorant, dishonest, and angry, I’ve watched it. It is their faith.

Trump lured them into a kind of danger and accountability they seemed enthusiastically unaware of and resistant to seeing.

Some of the boys seemed to think they were at a frat party, sitting in the principal’s chair, peeing on the teacher’s maple desk, laughing and trying to be bad.

Watching them high-five each other and yell at reporters, I couldn’t help but think of a book I read last month called Dying Of Whiteness: How The Politics Of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland by scholar and researcher Jonathan Metzl.

Traveling across America, wrote Metzl, “I repeatedly found examples  of policies, politics, or products that claimed to restore white authority but silently delivered lethality.”

Trumpism kills, not only coronavirus victims but many of the working-class whites who embrace his lies.  They have been tricked into thinking liberalism or socialism or universal health care will take things away from them, even though they have nothing now.

I saw many of them in Washington on TV yesterday.

These were heartland people trashing and literally shitting on the seat of our government.

They don’t know that big business, fatcat billionaires,  social conservatives, and the Republican Party have been lying to them for years about who’s responsible for their growing troubles.

To associate liberal democracy with a kind of fascism that will ruin their lives. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be the best thing that ever happened to them if she were in charge, but they embrace her demonizing and hate her poise.

In keeping them resentful of “socialists” and ‘lefties” and “immigrants” and the “poor” and wussy parents and teachers and scientists and media people and woo-woos who don’t want their kids getting gunned in schools, they perpetuate a system that keeps them poor, tolerates drug epidemics and gun wounds, steals their jobs,  takes away their health care and leaves them without work.

That is the heart of Trumpism. Those were the people in Washington on Tuesday.

They have been taught to believe that Donald Trump’s narrative is that of an honest and fearless here come to save them and set fire to the government they have learned to hate.

I think a lot of them are about to learn otherwise. Trump will soon run off with all of their money, leaving them behind with an angry and vengeful country. They will only get screwed again.

I wanted to cry when I thought how much they must hate their government and their country if they could do what they did to the capitol. Tuesday.

They are in for a big shock, I think. They will not get what they wanted in Washington, and lots of them will be hiring lawyers.

The federal government is unlike anything they have run across. It deeply resents being humiliated and has lots of experience in punishing and tormenting the people who do it, and plenty of manpower.

They absolutely never win. The FBI is one of the world’s foremost movement busters, from the KKK to Communists.

They play dirty too.

The boil that festers under Trumpism had to burst, and it did. Tuesday That seems both natural and even healthy to me. We each get to see the other side clearly.

It’s all out in the open now, give Trump credit for that.

Even the craven and crass Republicans threatening the election seemed stunned and said they were considering getting the electoral college certification done and perhaps actually accomplishing something useful.

Maybe they will even tell the truth to a lie-sick constituency.

As to Trump, he debased himself and our country once again, in the most dramatic and treasonous way yet.

He actually engineered and inspired – and will be blamed for – a literal, not political, assault on the very heart of our government. Will it matter, sure. Everything matters in the end.

Things will not be the same. If he was certain to leave in two weeks, it is beyond question now that he will be gone. In fact, I’d be surprised if he even made it two weeks.

Trump made some powerful enemies this week, many of them prized supporters and ass-kissers. The list of betrayed employees is too long to repeat.

He even managed to trash and offend his favorite devoted puppy and cheerleader, Vice President Mike Pence, who joined the growing list of former allies who abandoned him.

If you believe in a just God, you believe that there is justice, and those who do good will receive it. Or you can just believe in justice.

Trump is building a maximum-security prison for himself and locking himself more and more day by day.

He has surpassed greek tragedy and grown to Shakespeare. He is our Richard the Third, prominent in the tragic hero gallery.

Like Trump, Richard is flawed to the core, flying into mad rages at any insult, seething with resentment at anyone who has ever rejected, mocked, or spoken ill of him.

His twisted spine and withered arm (think sociopathic and narcissistic behavior, Trump’s deformities are not always obvious) cast him as a sympathetic figure at times.

He is a tormented, ambitious, and savage figure, just like Donald Trump.

The world looks at us today with dropped jaws and disbelief.

If Richard the III were alive today, Americans would probably choose him to be their next President because he spoke his mind, killed when he said he would, and was not your typical king.

We are not a healthy country right now.

Watching the police reinforcements arrive in great numbers all night to calmly and methodically quell Trump’s long-in-the-planning of the secret insurrection, I thought that politics is nothing if not the world of unintended consequences.

As line after line of police arrived towards dusk,  I detected a change in the crowd’s mood.

The full weight of the democracy was arriving, and it seemed to occur to the rioters that this might not be as much fun as it seemed to be at first when they were all getting one another exciting online, trading tips on where to hide their guns.

I couldn’t help noticing how calm and gentle the police were as opposed to the beatings and gassing they handed out so readily during the protests over George Floyd. Nobody waited hours to ask those protesters to please move.

People trashing the capitol and parading around outside were acting as if Trump would now stay in office. That was the plan, wasn’t it to ignite a rebellion that would save him, prompt a declaration of martial law, and deny Biden’s certification.

According to some of his aides and the reporters they talked to, that was the plan. There was nothing spontaneous about Tuesday, the President had been talking about for weeks. That was what he was doing as the pandemic spread from place to place and person to person.

By dusk, it seemed the rioters were not laughing to much.

Most of the Republican Senate wasn’t co-operating with the rioters by praising them, the general public didn’t seem to be rushing to their side, their hero avoided marching with them, as he had promised,  the media reports were scathing, and the mayor said she would toss all of them in jail if they went outside after 6 p.m.

It was dawning on them that they wouldn’t get within a half-mile of the capital again, now or ever in their lives. And the FBI was already going over videos looking for people to arrest.

It wasn’t going quite as planned. Rather than being hailed as heroes, they were called rioters, looters, insurrectionists, terrorists,  traitors. They didn’t seem to expect that.

True heroes get praise, not scorn. Perhaps their own personal media would rally to them.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be as much fun as Donald Trump had promised in his tweets.

One thing always leads to another thing, everything has consequences, and almost no one can reliably predict the future.

Trump did the impossible Wednesday, he brought Republicans and Democrats together, helped turn control of the Senate over to Democrats, and reminded all of us what it means to live in a democracy and how fragile it can be.

We learned that we have been fortunate in our choices of Presidents. Some were good, some were awful, but none of them saw their primary purpose as to ruin our country and its Constitution.

Generally, people are wise. But not always, warned Jefferson. Sometimes they become a mob and follow the first demagogue to pop up and promise them greatness.

Week by week, Trump calls to us to pay attention to our democracy and to fight for it, even in his madness. We are paying attention, we are righting for it.

Still, it’s too easy to focus on the time on what Trump does wrong, that is cheap and easy.

But it’s important one day after the GeorgiaQuake to understand and acknowledge what he has done for us as well as to us.

Today, his sworn opponents are taking control of the Senate, and his most loyal ally, Vice President Pence, abandoned him.

Donald Trump is the Maestro of his own destruction; I watch in fascination and some horror as he builds this prison for himself, first in the White House, and then at the castle Mar-a-Largo his own Guantanamo Bay in Palm Beach.

Soon, he will head off into exile, a suspected loser, and a friendless, isolated, life, surrounded only by sycophants and supplicants, all with their hands out, all telling him what he wants to hear, every day losing more and more touch with the real world.

Following him will be legions of powerful enemies, more now than ever, looking to reject him, get away from him, write their books, investigate him, maybe even send him to jail.

He doesn’t dare even to visit his first castle, Trump Towers, where he spent so many years going to parties, being unfaithful to his wives, lying to judges and journalists, and scheming to get his name into the tabloids.

I remember him from my days in New York City; I always thought he was having fun. In his own brazen way, he was fun.

Reading through his biographers, it seems that he was always happiest when he was seeking power, always miserable when he got it. He was good at wanting things, but not getting things done.

I never think he is having fun now.

Palm Beach is no Manhattan. He can’t go home again.

It is astonishing to me how alone a Mad King can be, even when surrounded day and night by people and adored by millions of people who have no idea what he is like and cannot soothe or tame the awful fear insecurity inside of him.

The words of his niece, who wrote the enduring book of the Trump Era, “Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man,” have never seemed truer or more poignant.

More than anyone who tried, Mary Trump explained him in a way we all could understand.

Writing of her Uncle, the 45th President of the United States, Mary Trump said of our own Charles III: “Acknowledging the victims of Covid-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait that his father taught him to despise…Donald can no more advocate for the sick and the dying than he could put himself between his father and Fred (his brother. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald, there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people.” Everything is transactional for her uncle, she wrote; she described him as an “epic tragedy.”

Instead of caring for his citizens, she writes, Trump withdraws to his comfort zones – Twitter, Fox News, his paid and bullied acolytes,” his fawning and terrified aides, casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker.

He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. “But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy.”

Now it will be harder than ever. He will still get the attention he craves, but mostly, it won’t be the kind of attention he wants. And it certainly won’t be any fun. His philandering days are over, and Melania is told they have the best prenup of them all.

She doesn’t even have to live with him. say the rumors.

The more defiant, the more lost, the more pathetic, the lonelier. In advance of the capital attack, his bleak and haunted appearance before the Proud Boys was a salute to his dwindling centers of power.

It would be heartbreaking if it weren’t so disturbing.

Let’s all go to the capital now, he said. Whoops. He knew better than to go. He didn’t want to be around when it happened.

People fret all the time about the loyalty Trump’s followers have for him, but it is loyal of fans for a movie star, not the love of people for a leader. There is something so remote and empty about it, none of them ever get near him, not to have a beer, to get a personal visit, or a visit to the White House.

He is a germaphobe, he likes to tell people, and his own supporters are germs. They loved American flags even as they tear down America; they love red caps and big trucks. He told them to go home and then added, “I love you.”

Really, he loves people who trashed the U.S. Capitol, threatening to maim or kill people who disagreed with them? The optics were good, as he practically blew them all a virtual kiss.

None of those people waving their flags and hiding their rifles in their trucks know him or will ever get to know him, any more than a fan gets to know the star they adore and swear loyalty to. He is not the world’s most powerful man; today, he is the loneliest man.

“These people are not going to take it any longer,” Trump told the crowd of supporters in Washington today, which was smaller than he claimed it was, “they’re not going to take it any longer.”

That’s true, but mostly because a wall of hurt is about to rain down on many of them. The resistance is alive and well and is soon coming to power. And it will run the Justice Department, not Trump.

If only Vice President Pence would overturn the stolen election he told his fan, then that will be that he will remain President.  “And if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold the Constitution.”

I guess I’m supposed to be frightened, but instead, I’m mostly sad. How wrenching it is to see someone fall apart like that as millions and millions of people watch. One by one, every one of the quislings and sycophants fails and is banished.

Maria and I said the same thing to each other this morning. We were never patriots before this; we just lived here. We are patriots now.

This was a bad week for the President. Worse to come, I would think.

I do not believe Donald Trump will refuse to leave the White House, nor do I believe he was or is remotely capable of clinging to power. We flirted with Armageddon, it didn’t come.

America’s greatness came as a liberal democracy, not a constipated and selfish Corporate Nation. Perhaps the Georgia election means we can restore some of that earned glory.

For the past couple of years, I’ve seen the Democrats as the Dumb and Bumbling Party and Mitch McConnell’s Republicans the smart ones – ruthless, bold, and united.

Lately, the party has been flirting with authoritarianism. Right now, that is not working out for them. The Republicans have become the Stupid Party, out of touch and without a moral foundation.

Recent election data has made it clear that Americans want a leader who comes from just to the center’s right, not from the far left, not from the far right, not from the far, anything.

When Donald Trump was at his zenith, he pulled many far-right and dangerous loyalists into his political party.

Voters rejected his extremism in November and again last night in Georgia. The next President will come from the center.

Wednesday, Eric Trump, the President’s son, showed us why Trumpism is failing when these past couple of months could have been their highest point.

“I will personally work to defeat every single Republican Senator/Congressman who doesn’t stand up to this fraud – they will be primaried, and they will lose,” tweeted the son of the 45th president of the United States.

Leadership by fear and intimidation.

Somehow, I don’t think all of Congress lives in fear of Eric Trump. They don’t even seem to fear his father much any more.