From the beginning of Trump’s intrusion into American political life, the striving, orderly, result-oriented, liberal world and its media were unable to fathom his carelessness and cluelessness or understand him or his supporters by any standard political measures. Hence, what might appear to be crazy and self-destructive must in fact have been a plan.

Politics could not be pure caprice or farce, could it?

This insistence on specific intent, on the calculated and “coordinated” misuse of power, keeps Donald Trump in the realm of knowable politics. But what if it was precisely the absence of intent and, instead, the swings of irrationality and mania that managed, even as his government collapsed, to hold so many people in thrall?

The fundamental modern assumption is that a crazy person cannot be elected president—a bad person, a corrupt person, an incompetent person, a mendacious person, a bigoted one, yes, but not someone who has completely departed reality. The age of modern bureaucracy demands, at the very least, being able to sit through a meeting without barking like a dog.

From the careening and calamitous last stage of his reelection campaign through the preposterous election challenge and the deadly mayhem of January 6 to the improbable buffoonery of his second impeachment trial, there emerges a much different picture from the one much of the media has painted of a corrupt, cynical, despotic effort to hold on to power and to subvert democracy. Here, instead, is a far more complicated human and political tale of desperation and delusion.

It is one that should by any logic have ended on January 6. But the most striking and determinative fact of the political age is that the Trump story continues, even in defeat, to be inspirational to so many—and why all Republican roads now lead to Mar-a-Lago. “Mr. President,” said the pollster Tony Fabrizio, trying to explain to Trump what even he might have had trouble fully grasping, “your voters believe whatever you tell them to believe.” Indeed, by mid-May 2021, new polling showed 67 percent of Republicans were of the view that Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump does nothing right. Cannot put one pants leg on at a time. His ham-handed, doomed, blundering, and embarrassing efforts to undo that election, together with his heedless call to arms on January 6, showed him once more to be the naked emperor, evident not only to his enemies but, with ever-deeper sighs of incredulity, also to his allies. And yet, here we are, him with his grip on the heart of only slightly less than half the nation, the once and future Donald Trump, licking his wounds and, eyeing his public, figuring what new, absurd, and rash exploit to embark on.