I started out being angry. I couldn’t accept the idea that we had a congenital liar for our president — someone who simply disregarded the difference between fact and fiction whenever it suited his purposes. When you first run into someone who displays such a blatant refusal to think, the frustration level is so high that you don’t stop to wonder what the explanation might be. Your first thought might be something more like a punch in the gut. But in the case of an elected president, this is impractical. The Secret Service may be so woefully incompetent that they can’t stop a man with a knife from slipping into the White House, but you can’t count on it. And the consequences would likely be distinctly uncomfortable for the next trespasser, given the ear-wired guardians’ embarrassment and their desire to demonstrate improvement.

So you are reduced to ineffective fulmination. You dream up all sorts of schemes to combat this new form of beyond-the-pale behavior. You go back and research the tactics that eventually brought down Joseph McCarthy. You get yourself a “Resist” button for your lapel, or a pussy hat, depending on your gender, and you start making it a point to fact-check the man every time he opens his Tweeter. At first this provides some satisfaction, but in the end it proves useless. For one thing it is too easy. He is so obvious (and oblivious) that he can generally be fact-checked on the fly by any competent reporter, even before the evidence is gathered. And to his chanting choristers his over-the-top lying is not a minus; it’s a plus — it relieves both them and him of the burden of actual thought. Just let go, yell and enjoy your new power. “Lock her up!” “Build that wall!” And anyway he himself doesn’t worry about being caught off base. On the contrary, he revels in it. He uses his gaffes to claim that he is being unfairly hounded by the “enemies of the people” — the press, with their nitpicking insistence on accuracy. “Gotcha!” you realize, will do you no more good than it did Sarah Palin.

But resistance is nevertheless the only course that offers any promise. The Right’s reviled “Deep State” — the institutions that generations of serious politicians have over the years legislated in place to ensure a modicum of logic and decorum among the people elected to execute the complicated business of running the country — will not be so easily Tweeted out of existence. The Donald’s wild claims and baseless promises will still, you tell yourself, have to be vetted by responsible adults — representatives and senators who have sworn to uphold the laws of the land with oaths no less binding than the one he is so cavalier about. This vetting will surely bring his ravings down to earth, you say, and in the end bring him down too. “You can fool some of the people, etc…”. But lo and behold! A voting majority of the grownups you were counting on turn out to be not so grown up after all. They are as easily seduced by promises of permanent personal incumbency and future employment by the Koch Brothers (or, in other words, access to the public trough) as the reddest redneck who believes that global warming, automation, and the switch to sustainable energy can be stopped with a Luddite sledge hammer, wielded by a lunatic with tangerine-colored hair and an itch to grab women like bowling balls. They are so focused on their perks and their tax rates that they have forgotten their oaths. So that’s not going to work either. No use betting your money on companies planning to market buggy whips.

So what’s left?

How about trying a little patience? There will be some damage along the way, yes, but the country is not basically in such bad shape that it can’t survive a little chip or two around the edges.

A moment’s reflection will be enough to convince you that a man who is so thirsty for genuflection that he invents magazine cover pictures of himself to hang in his golf clubs — evidence of adulation that he knows full well doesn’t exist because he had to create those magazine covers himself when there wasn’t any other way to get them — such a man’s hunger for recognition cannot ever be satisfied. He is fated to be forever disappointed. The adoring crowds that continue to exist in his mind but that no one else can see or photograph will never be real. Deep down he knows they weren’t real. That knowledge will gnaw and gnaw and gnaw inside him until it finally reaches a vital organ. Like Pygmalion he has set himself a goal that is unattainable. “They love us! They love me!” he shouts, knowing that they don’t. The shouts will have to get ever louder to drown out the doubts, but there is a limit to how many decibels a single madman can generate all by himself.

Where does this end up, then?

That’s not so easy to predict, except that it seems certain that it will probably be ugly both for the patient with the disease and for anyone whose well being is in any way affected by that patient’s whims. Relevant examples are easy to cite : from Cheops, whose pyramid could not reach the clouds, through Ramses, Caesar, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler. Those are just some of the big names among overreachers. There are plenty of smaller names : Mussolini, Ceausescu, Saddam, Khadaffi. But they have all ended up the same way, overthrown eventually by their “adoring” subjects who could no longer put up with the farce. The question is how long those “adoring” subjects in West Virginia, dying of untreated Black Lung and watching their children die from medical neglect, will wait to exact their revenge.

So I don’t have to waste my time feeling anger. I can waste it instead feeling sorry for the poor tormented demented tangerine-haired invalid and waiting for him to blow his own top. With some sympathy left over the country that didn’t see this coming. Better luck next time.

I will try to be patient.