Don’t say you weren’t warned. Please, don’t ever say that.

Looking back, the damage that had been done to American democracy by the Trump administration was almost incalculable. It was as if someone had lifted the Constitution out of its bulletproof, moisture-controlled sealed case in the Rotunda of the National Archives and edited it with a Sharpie. First Amendment? Ah, not so much. Fifth Amendment? Nobody needs all that stuff. Fourteenth Amendment? Don’t worry about it. With the grace of a defensive tackle at a ballet recital, Donald Trump and his sycophants had undermined the foundations of our republic; they had introduced new forms of vulgarity to the political system, inflicted terrible damage on the authority of the judiciary and the credibility of the media, coarsened the national dialogue, and emboldened hatred in all of its disguises. The Trump administration was the political version of the comedian’s fabled Aristocrats—the most vile, repugnant act in history.

Whatever chance at reelection Trump might have had disappeared with his fumbling response to the pandemic. I remember playing Covfefe Scrabble his last few months in office: any combination of letters that looked like it might be a real word was legal. Jenny and I had just started dating and I usually zayed her! Trying to find the right person to follow Trump was like watching a blind man in a dark room stumbling to fit a plug into a socket. There was no right answer.

In those last days of that administration I actually believed the worst was over. According to the pollsters, “any breathing person” was about 10 points more popular than Donald Trump. “Any dead person” was only 6 points more desirable. Ah, the innocence of a middle-aged journalist.

The big question was how much of the chaos was permanent. One terrible night in the sandbox years earlier we’d been dropped into a firefight to reinforce a patrol that had been ambushed. When we hit the ground, I looked around at the wounded and the dying and wondered, Where the hell do I start? That was what the whole world was wondering six years ago: Where does America go from Trump? My boss at the Pro, Howie Bernstein, summed up the problem in his most colorful journalese, pointing out, “You can’t push crap back up an asshole.”

In retrospect, it didn’t really matter who came next. We could just as easily have elected the grizzled old guy with the missing teeth who took the tickets at a traveling carnival as the Democrat. In a desperate effort to return to normalcy, the Biden administration shined up old ideas and pretended they had discovered gold. But those officials who filled the so-called Black Hole of Leadership either didn’t fully understand the extent of the damage or lacked the capability to respond to its economic aftermath. Our national foundations had been destroyed and even MacGyver with a 102-piece Craftsman tool kit couldn’t fix it. An anonymous poster on Facebook compared the Dems to housekeepers walking into a hotel room after the Stones had spent a week there. It was as hopeless as trying to glue a patch on the Titanic. Any chance they might have had to keep the ship of state afloat ended with the drought and resulting famine that plagued half the world.