President Trump's extended tantrum is a complicated thing to get a hold of. On the one hand it's basically criminal in any civic sense. I'm pretty confident it will result in at least some people getting killed - hopefully not many. It also leaves at least some of his ...

2/ opponents with some lingering fear that somehow he'll cheat the system and stay. And yet at the same time it has created a sort of schadenfreude time dilation event. Politics is a contact sport with a lot of heartache and jubilation at critical moments. Normally ...

3/ Trump's diehard opponents would have had one press conference or evening where they savored the reality of his defeat. But here, he basically keeps losing each day. His own furious impotence keeps driving headlong into the same wall each day we move forward.

4/ One of the defining features of the Trump era has been the spectacle of dignity wraithing, the one reasonably respectable men and women would enter into his gravitational pull and slowly be shorn of whatever dignity they once had. And the key point being that there was ...

5/ some voodoo he possessed that got people to surrender their dignity, just taking an axe to themselves and lop off larger pieces every day. And yet here now at the end it's him. Trumpism may not be over. The republic may be destined for destruction. And yet on January 20th ...

6/ he's done. That's like the speed of light right now. A barrier that the basic laws of the universe won't brook any violation of. And for him that's just like eating a kryptonite sandwich. His lawyers are clearly humoring him with lawsuits that keep getting thrown out ...

7/ of court. His stop staffers are leaking to journalists that they're happy to see it be over and that the whole effort at this point is just to shelter his ego, not extend his presidency. We know that in the crude and arrested Trumpian mental world the worst thing is ...

8/ that people are laughing at you and that you're weak. There's only the dominating and the dominated. He is helpless and entirely incapable of doing the things that preserve any amount of personal dignity. And with this, I see it in people's response, people are losing ...

9/ the fear. He may always have been a joke. But he was a scary joke. Now he's more of a joke. Like I said we may be doomed. But he can't get past Jan 20th. He can neither accept it nor escape it. He's extending the agony but also threatening his legions of detractors with ...

10/ a kind of grave schadenfreude toxicity and he implodes anew each day with no end in sight.