Exclusive: If you stare at the Scooby-Doo 10,000 Volt Ghost Electric Monster in the photo above, you may notice an eerie resemblance to the soon-to-be almost former President. He has the same scowl and the same hair.

Watching him over the summer and especially over the last two weeks, I couldn’t help wondering if he took “Dictator and Violent Overthrow of Government” lessons from the Scooby-Doo Book of Villians, especially  Electric Monster.

In the Scooby-Doo lexicon, the 10,000-volt ghost was the disguise of Mr. Voltner, who faked his own death and pretended to be his own ghost in order to scare people and chase them away.

The Monster even looks like Trump, especially his hair and that permanent scowl. When I first saw that scowl, I thought, this is a  humorless and joyless man who just took an enema, or who needs one.

That scowl is embedded into Trump’s face and jaw.

Everyone I know and am close to – even many of his supporters – tell me they can’t wait until Donald Trump gets his military parade tomorrow morning and finally gets on Air Force One and flies out of Washington and away from his life of tweets.

They seem to have this fantasy that they will be done with him and his tweets, that life will return to normal. I don’t think so.

Trump is taking the idea normal away with him when he goes. And he’s leaving Senators Cruz and Hawley behind to be calculating and hateful.

I’m not sure we’ll ever see normal in the old day again. But I bet it will be better.

As president, Trump appears to have only one outrage left in him, the wave of pardons he’s preparing to sign before he leaves office.  A good day for his shady friends and a host of Putin lovers.

We know there will never be much peace while this man lives, but the noise level should go down by quite a bit. It already has. When we will see those tax returns.

For me, life will never be the same, and I would be lying if a part of me didn’t admit to being emotional about his farewell and if I didn’t also admit that in some ways, I would miss him. How often do you get to write about somebody like that?

When you study some for months, even years, and he or she changes your life, and you write about them and read a score of books about them, you can ask any reporter: you can’t help but attach to them in emotional ways.

Donald Trump has become a part of me, he is in my head, and there will be some emptiness in my life and work when he is gone. I can’t think of any other figure in my life who has dominated our common space as much as he has and engaged my attention for as long.

Trump helped to make me a true patriot, I think, not a blockhead playing at one. He helped me form an Army Of Good, and we have done tons of good.

He inspired me to work hard on developing a spiritual, rather than a political response to his cruelty and corruption. He helped to deepen my commitment to being truthful and to see the cancer that lying is.

He taught me what democracy is worth, and reminded me that I can’t simply leave it to other people to protect and defend our idea about freedom and the peaceful transition of power.

Shakespeare was a genius when it came to creating Mad Kings and villains, but Trump puts him to shame regarding cruelty and complexity and prideful and unrepentant rage. I can’t forgive him for what he did to the refugees and immigrants.

Trump, then, has very few redeeming qualities. He is not a nice person. He has no empathy. He cares nothing for the needy or the vulnerable.

He hides behind people who take care of him and then tosses them away, often in the most vicious sand thoughtless of ways.

Even the people who love him have little good to say about him. His accomplishments – there are a number of them – are structural and conceptual. No help for refugees, no worrying about the environment, no associations with allies, no rights for laborers, his deference to and fascination with despots and dictators, and his utter lack of integrity or sense of personal honor.

He is just a lousy human being. No wonder he doesn’t have dogs.

This year, I encountered a lot of Trump messengers unhappy with what I was writing.

Some were eager to engage in a civil and useful dialogue, most seemed, angry, nasty, and whiney to me as if they were the first and only people in America who had ever suffered or been disappointed by their government.

I love to argue with people, but the Trump people who came onto my blog were rarely much fun. They showed up, called me names, and vanished as a rule. They never stopped to argue. They never imagined that Trump might lose the election.

So they chose not to believe it.

As he leaves, the country finds a lot of soul searching and reflection. When did the idea of liberal democracy become so detached from ordinary people and their lives.

Can the Republican Party survive as a far-right and white Christian minority, and who will pay attention to the infrastructure or other complex tasks of government now that Trump has left a government in shambles?

Trump did punch a lot of holes in our democracy, our smugness, and our insistence that we were great. I think a lot of us learned that we are not yet great, but would like to be.

Trump turned out to be a racist and white nationalist, after all, he was a dark stain on the national soul, one it will be difficult to wash out.

Why we want to know, did such an unlikeable and incompetent leader get so many people to love him and vote for him, and what does this tell us about our democracy and the sickness of national purpose that seems to be spreading like a pandemic all its own?

It is simple to make fun of Donald Trump and ridicule and condemn him; believe me, it is hard to understand him. I think I will most miss trying to figure him out, I don’t recall a more creative or spiritual challenge.

Donald Trump has burrowed deeply into my conscience and consciousness. One of the fascinating things about him as the Brooding King prepares to leave us for Castle Mar-A-Largo and the next reality sh0w is the dichotomy and civic schizophrenia that he represents, at least to me:

He is loveless, at times he is disgusting; he hates the very idea of democracy and is capable of great evil. He has no ideas for America beyond grievance, greed, and selfishness.

He is almost primally dangerous, yet he is also the most hapless and even clueless villain that I have ever read about, studied, or encountered. If you look at what he did rather than what he promised, he comes out more like a clown than a rebel leader.

How can any writer worth a roll of toilet paper not miss writing about someone like this, a genuine sociopath with almost unlimited power and arrogance and a hatred for the very system that elected and sustains him?

If you ever wondered what really happens when the inmates take over the asylum, pay attention to the news.

It is still hard for me to fathom how he blew an almost guaranteed re-election day by day, stupid by stupid move, from Tulsa to his debate catastrophe, to his bungling of the pandemic,  from his absolute refusal to win a single vote he didn’t have before.

One of the big shocks for me about the riot at the capitol was the realization that Trump not only provoked the riot, but he was the riot; there is no space between him and the rioters, they are opposite ends of the same thing: clueless, hapless and stunningly incompetent.

How could he have stopped it, or even tried? It would be like forgetting to spray that nest on his head a golden brown or orange, or turning a gun on himself?

A runaway truck can do great harm, but it has no consciousness.

A President and his thousands of followers are presumed to think and reason, judge consequence, and possess some judgment to tell fantasy from reality.

I can resent him and regret him, but I have never been frightened of him because he screws up every single thing he has ever done, from marriage to gambling to business to porn stars to sexual predation to a pandemic.

The love affair with the mad child from North Korea, his romance with Alexandr Putin,  stealing an election to staging a coup – this  would have been hilarious if weren’t also so frightening and ultimately tragic.

It turns out that Trump really thought he could overturn the election if he just charmed some of those people to count and certify elections. He really did things his Supreme Court Justices would save him. He really did think his Storm Troopers would seize control of the government and halt Biden’s victory.

It turns out he doesn’t know it is illegal to pressure voting officials to “find” enough votes for him to win. Or that his followers are not stronger than the federal government.

He didn’t know that if you incite a cranked up mob that has been lied to every day for months, something bad will happen.

He and his followers mirror one another. There is no space between them; there is no way he can criticize them, stop them, or shame them. It would be like rejecting his own soul. Better to go down with them than break away.

When you see his supporters’ stories, then his presidency starts to make sense. This is no Hitler, as I’ve said 100 times. This is a Scooby-Doo Villain.

Joshua Matthew Black lives in Alabama.

He says he came to Washington on January 6, another day that will live in infamy, answering his leader’s call to come and save his country. It was a chance to join in his own Lexington and Concord, and how often do you get a chance to save your country?

According to The Washington Post,   Black appeared in a video posted to YouTube two days after the attack. In the video, he proudly admits to entering the Capitol and displays his carrying a knife.

There is absolutely nothing in the video that suggests in any way that he knew he was committing a crime, perhaps more than one.

“Once we found out that Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the election, like, officially, the crowd went crazy. I mean, it became a mob…I wanted to get inside the building so I could plead the blood of Jesus over it. That was my goal.”

An unnamed Trump supporter with a Nazy swastika tattoo on his neck told the FBI that he was shocked to learn that it was illegal for him to ransack a Senator’s office and steal his papers.

“It can’t be illegal,” he told one agent who came for him, “My President asked me to do it, and he is the President.”

There was the Qanon leader who demanded organic food in jail, and the young man who brought his mother to Washington so she could see him help smash up the capitol.

Online, scores of people brought up a meme from “The Simpsons” in which a character named Jimbo Jones is shown holding a camcorder with the caption, “videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we’ve ever had.”

Perhaps, joked one,  agent, this might be the easiest criminal investigation the FBI had ever conducted, said one agent drily. Maybe the Trump warriors will wear name tags next time.

I think my favorite Trump marauder might be Texas real estate agent Janna Ryan, who used the horrific attack on the capitol to boost her real estate business.

“We’re gonna..go in there, life or death! It doesn’t matter,” she said in a since-deleted, curse-laden video from  Washington. “Y’all know who to hire for your Realtor: Jenna Ryan.”

A Texas home buyer posted a message on Twitter: “She (Jenna) was my realtor, but I fired her,” she said. “We went to look at a house, but instead of getting the key from the lockbox, she ran and jumped through the window chanting USA, USA, and told me to follow her if I was a patriot. I didn’t buy the house.”

When the FBI first questioned Kevon Lyons of Chicago about his video taken outside Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, he told them that he dreamt he was in the Capitol the day of the riot.

They responded by showing him an Instagram of his standing outside Pelosi’s office with a caption that read: Whose House? Our House?”

Keven was impressed. “Wow,” he told the agents, “you’re good. That was only up for an hour.

Five people died in the capitol; others were beaten and threatened with death. You look at these videos, though, and sometimes wonder if these fearsome patriots need a spanking rather than time in jail.

Then there is the grandmother effect, as federal agents are calling it. To hide from the FBI, many rioters have rushed to their grandmother’s houses to escape arrest there. The grandmothers are angry and embarrassed.

“What the hell was he doing there?,” one grandmother asked of her rioting sun, suspected of stealing from several congressional offices. “All he does here is play video games all day.”

Tonight as I struggle with how to feel about Trump’s departure, I wonder at how it is that one person can come so far, do so much damage, and be such a spectacularly incompetent Goofus in so many ways. The truth is that the 10,000-volt monster is a lot scarier.

When Trump was begged and pressured for hours to try to stop the riot and call for his supporters to stop the violence, he recorded a blatantly half-hearted video which ended with this stern rebuke to the rioters: “I love you.”

And that was the only sincere thing he has yet to say about the rioting and deaths. And he spends day after day wondering and whining about the fact that even many of his closest loyalists won’t defend him.

The real question about Trump is always the same. “Why?”

No fame, success, or achievement is enough for him. Whatever he has, he wants more. Whatever he doesn’t have, he wants to have. He has serious mental health concerns.

More than anything, he wants to be loved and admired. More than anything, he really isn’t either. If the rioters seemed addicted to grievances and screens, Trump is addicted to attention and affirmation.

His niece Mary alerted me to the most important thing there is to know about Trump in her wonderful book about her uncle, Too Much And Never Enough.

He is, she said, one of the most dangerous men in the world.

But he is incapable of learning, changing, or strategizing. He has no idea how the real world works. He thinks he has a shot at the Nobel Prize.  These are major weaknesses for a man who tried to stage a coup and take over the world’s most powerful democracy.

So goodbye, Mr. President, I will not soon forget you.  I doubt I will ever forget you.

You have some bumpy times ahead, but then, you always thrive on bumpy times. And you will always the best story of the day, wherever you are.

I think for you, that might be the achievement you prize the most.