Trump is finished. Really.

We had a pretty rare moment this weekend when a man who was the most powerful character in the world only a couple of months ago slipped into irrelevance and basically sealed his own political career. I think it’s all because of what he thinks about when he is alone in the middle of the night. You know the feeling, thoughts that won’t go away no matter how hard you try to suppress them. Instead, as this New York Times story shows, Trump embraces them and strengthens and repeats them, no matter how ridiculous that might seem.

He continues to push the argument that he actually won the election even though certified and recounted and closely measured votes all over the place say he did not, most clearly. Still, he insists the election was stolen from him. I think he takes these thoughts to bed with him and festers through the night, wondering how he can get even.

He can’t. He lost and he won’t admit it. Of course he still has supporters who insist he was robbed, and they will always be there, like Holocaust deniers and people who think the moon landing was staged. We call those people crazy, and now Trump has fallen in with the lot. Look at what he said and who he is raging at and you can see it. I’m no great fan of Mitch McConnell, but I think the senator did exactly what he was required to do in playing his part in certifying the election. That he lambasted Trump in a floor speech was unusual only in its strangeness. If you believed he was responsible in the attack on the capitol on Jan. 6, why didn’t you vote to impeach him in retrospect.

But that’s his problem, not mine or yours.

We are at an unusual point in our national politics, a place where many Republicans are supporting the actions of a Democratic President who has moved quite quickly to contain this murderous epidemic and stimulate the economy it had just about recked. These actions are working, just a few years after President Trump, in a determined and foolish set of actions, diminished the pandemic and substituted name calling for public policy. Shame on him forever for doing that. How many of our 500,000 pandemic deaths he might have saved is anyone’s guess, but there is no doubt about the fact that a volume of them is his to carry responsibility for. Inject bleach? That was his suggestion, along with some other wacky ones.

So the fact that he is still blathering down at Mar a Lago even as his supplicants wander in to pay fealty to this fat loser is no surprise. The open secret of the Trump era was that the man had a mental illness that was not treated and never should have been in office in the first place. We all know that now, and that his his reality to carry for the rest of his life.