“The greatest glory in living lies not in falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Nelson Mandela.

Listening to as much of the impeachment “debate” as I could bear, my mind kept going back to Mark Twain’s very famous statement that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

It took years of lying to get us into this mess; it will take at least much work and time to get us out. Time to get to work.

Trump and his followers are the lies that keep on giving. They are indefatigable, nourished by nothing but more lies.

Every time we begin to take a deep breath and celebrate the idea that he is gone, he popes up again like some electrolyzed zombie who cannot be killed.

He may have been brought to life in Frankenstein’s Laboratory; lightning did that to his hair. There is much power in having no shame.

If the sun kills vampires, then the truth will eventually kill Trump and his cult.  If you know your history, you know that truth always wins in the end; it’s just that the end sometimes makes its own time.

Listening to the debate was discouraging, draining; we seemed to rush back a few weeks in time, skipping over the insurrection at the capitol last week and rushing past the few minutes when we seemed we might be uniting.

There is no debate in this debate, only fury.

Twain was right, and his ironic comment is worth dwelling on. We live in the great Crossroads of Truth And Lies, the United States of America. It can bend the mind.

America’s most creative and exciting challenge is to start whacking the lies down. It can be done. It has been done.

Lies take seconds to make and even less time to race across the Internet, our new Super Highway Of Hatred And Insurrection.

China has figured out to handle this new highway; they ban any opinion they don’t like or rebellious comment, jailing and shooting whoever they need to jail and shoot.

Even in the era of Trump, America isn’t quite ready for that solution, but there will be a lot of talk this coming year about what the Internet is doing to our society and what can be done about it.

Like maybe making it a federal crime to threaten to kill people online.

On the House of Representatives’ floor, the lies had a good day, often spoken more loudly and angrily than the truth.

Nobody protested BLM marches. Antifa, not white nationalists, caused the violence. The Republican Party wants to unify the country. Nancy Pelosi is a communist, just like Joe Biden, who is also a socialist. The rioters were just kids who got carried away. Trump never incited violence; he just got a bit too excited.

Psychologists tell us that everybody lies, even though we know it’s wrong. But the problem with lying, say psychiatric studies, is that the more you lie, the easier it gets, and the more likely you are to do it again.

Donald Trump’s power lies with his ease and skill at lying, from Stormy Daniels to the Presidential Election.

People who know Trump well say that lying has become such an ingrained habit that he no longer can tell the difference between truth and lies.

That makes him a sociopath and a dangerous one.

His is a culture of lying, almost a Satanic religion.

He supported, promoted, inspired a new generation of righteous f liars, many of whom he pushed, cajoled, and campaigned to get into congress and public office. The crueler and uglier he is to people, the more his followers love him.

But it also traps him.

Every time he tries to act like a normal President, his follower’s rage and scream.  They didn’t elect a normal President.

The less he acts like a normal President, the more isolated and powerless he becomes. This is the hole he dug for himself and jumped into at every opportunity.

Six months ago, he had it made. A week ago, he finally managed to blow it all up.

Many of his congressional conspirators gave speeches today that were bristling with lies. Trump and his peeps tell so many lies that it’s almost impossible to keep up with them, let alone persuade people of the truth.

If lying takes an instant, correcting a lie takes a lot longer – the studies all say that. For most people, lying gets limited as we develop a sense of morality and the ability to self-regulate.

For Trump’s world, the lies grow and deepen. Trumpism is built on lies; lies are now firmly ingrained in millions of Americans’ neural systems. They have become their truth.

We tend to associate lying with bad people, but according to Scientific-American, lying is among the most sophisticated and demanding accomplishments of the human brain. Donald Trump might be a very stable genius, after all.

Electronic stimulation of the prefrontal cortex appears to improve our ability to deceive. This region of the brain may, among other things, be responsible for a decision to lie or tell the truth.

Trump’s prefrontal cortex must be the side of a basketball; perhaps that’s what that nest on the top of his head is hiding. (The prefrontal cortex below is in yellow.) You can tell a Trump follower by his forehead’s size: think Stephen Miller).

Psychology Today has reported at length about the difficulty of challenging a lie and getting people to accept the truth. Argument and denial don’t work.

How do we discredit lies without repeating them and spreading them further? The answer, says the magazine, is simple. When reporting or commenting on false statements, always lead with the truth.

University of California Berkeley Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff is one of the most prominent figures to promote this idea of deprogramming lies. He suggests that when discussing or commenting on one of Trump’s lies or those of his followers, we should always talk about the truth first.

Then we should briefly note the lie before going back to the truth.

He refers to this idea as a Truth Sandwich.

Instead of directly repeating a false claim, consider this structure instead: “The facts are X, but some have falsely claimed Y. Let’s focus on X.” This is a simple solution that friends, family members,  journalists, social media managers, fact-checking websites, and individuals can use to make sure that we spread truth, not lies.

When reporting lies, the facts should always come first. This way, our minds will stop confusing “alternative facts” with real ones.

Research, he says, suggests that we remember beginnings and endings far better than the middles of things, so calling out a lie while making sure we put the lie in the middle, where we will at least remember it, may help us ensure that the things that feel true to us actually are.

We are learning over time that Trumpism is, for many people, a cult, and cult followers are notoriously, even suicidally loyal to their cult leaders. They can’t be argued into the truth, at least not while the boss is around.

Challenges to cult followers must be patient, indirect, and repetitious.  Most people who have been lied to figure it out for themselves once separated from the source of the lying. It takes months, even years, to deprogram a lie.

They need some time and space.

It takes time and thought to undo a lie that people have been hearing and believing for days, weeks, even months.

Trump has almost hypnotic skills when he lies. Based on nothing but his repeated claims, almost half of the country believes he is telling the truth about the November election. Therefore, everyone else must be lying.

One of the most intriguing things about the attack on the capitol was the dream world many rioters were living in – conspiracy theories, Trump lies, social media rumors, and rage.

Hardly any of them knew the truth or had even heard it. This is a societal problem; no one is protecting them from perhaps the biggest scam in modern history – that Trump tells the truth about anything.

If sleazebags were stealing from their bank or retirement accounts, that would be a crime. Stealing someone’s honor and reality is considered the natural consequence of free speech.

Donald Trump just stole $300 million from his followers, with provably false claims.  Why does this sound like fraud to me?

This isn’t free in any way.

It appears to be time to get to work on lie-breaking.

The way to get started, said no less a Musketeer than Walt Disney, is to quit talking and begin doing.

Everyone who professes to cares about democracy, truth, and compassion has some work to do. Whining on Facebook only goes so far.

The bad news is that the lies have had so much time to live. The good news is that truth really is on our side. Truth corrodes lies; it has moral power behind it.

The impeachment debate reminds us – a good thing – that it will take time to unravel these lies and point Trump’s disappointed and manipulated followers in a different direction.

We have to stop thinking that all of this is over and then crashing when we see it isn’t.

It isn’t the end, but it might be the beginning of the end. Think of all those troops sleeping on the floors of government buildings in Washington.

Since self-interest brought his followers to Trump, self-interest will bring them back. “My son really isn’t interested in going to war,” said the mother of one of the rioters. “If he had a good job, he wouldn’t be making an ass out of himself in Washington.”

A start might be for the government to actually help these people, rather than ignore them or vilify them. Maybe it’s time to tell people the truth and work for the people, not just the lobbyists.

Whether people need every dollar or not, stimulus checks would help. So would the end of the coronavirus and enough vaccines for everyone to take and quickly.

So would those clean energy, high-paying jobs politicians have been talking about for years but are not showing up in Appalachia or the Industrial Midwest. So would some help with student debt.

That would help those collapsing hospitals and some health care for rural communities.

Politics is practical; it’s not really a noble or spiritual art.

Trump understood the transactional nature of politics. You do for them; they do for you.

He also understood that it didn’t really matter what you did; it mattered what you said you had done or would do.

No one had ever tried that before.

Trump’s biggest lie was in promising to do things for the people who love him so much. He lied. That is a huge hole for Joe Biden to walk into.

If the government is stunned by the politics of now into doing what it is supposed to do – helping people in tangible ways – those lying and cowardly crackpot congresspeople and toadies will be left sputtering and forgotten.

A massive infrastructure program would put many of those fuming working-class Trump voters to work.

As awful as it was, the insurrection further escalated the awakening process of many Americans and their institutions.

If I were voting, I’d say one of the most significant events of the week was the PGA’s decision – the most esteemed golfing organization in America – to pull its tournament out of Trump Bedminister.

When he loses them, he loses a big chunk of his soul and persona.

It is said that this was the worst punch in the gut for the President. His brand is poison.

We learned this year that a lot of people are threatening our democracy. We’ve also learned that even more people – many more people, from judges to CEO’s and aroused journalists – will fight for it. There is no turning back, only moving forward.

This is not the same country that Donald Trump was elected to lead in 2016. It is not even the same country that it was on June 5. Against all reason and odds, he brought democracy back to life and woke up a slumbering nation.

It will take a long time – years perhaps – before these lies will fade and unravel, and the political people who embraced them are slowly and relentlessly – and ruthlessly – replaced.

This process has begun. Senators Hawley and Cruz are ruined politically; their careers are grievously damaged. Trump himself is battered and bleeding.

The military has made it crystal clear that they are not into staging or supporting coups. All of those conservative judges really do love the constitution and will stand up for it.

And journalism still matters, now more than ever.

Finally, they proved their worth.

Black Americans now have one of the most powerful social organizations in American history – Black Lives Matter – to stand up for them. Stacey Abrams has proven that the impossible is possible. Integrity and a lot of footwork can change our world and has.

The immigrants and refugees will soon return to America.

And then there is the new President.

I like what I see of Joe Biden; I’m surprised and impressed. He isn’t the most exciting leader globally, but he is calm, steady, and focused on what the politicians call the People’s Business.

He’s stayed off the Trump Crazy Train and away from the partisan blood-letting.

If he sticks to that, contains the pandemic, mails out some more checks, and keeps the economy flowing, then the Truth Sandwich and changing times can begin to do their work.

I tried the sandwich last week. It worked on two different people. I believe in truth. It works.