A portion of our country also managed to fall deeply in love with Donald Trump — a “reality” TV star who maintains an even more tenuous relationship with reality than did his hero, the much more lovable Ronald Reagan. Trump and Reagan have opposite temperaments — Reagan eternally sunny, Trump ever dark, but both sell similar societal delusions. Trump manages to be truculently wrong on every existential question facing humanity — denying global warming, encouraging pollution, promoting resource depletion, enjoying saber rattling, opposing population and gun control, escalating obscene inequality, and trampling on civil rights protections. He has the demeanor of a circus barker, the integrity of a con man, the temperament of a neighborhood bully, the breathtaking ignorance of an arrogant know-nothing, the political instincts of a führer, and the policies of a tribal nationalist.

All the problems that are inherent in American exceptionalism are now very badly compounded by Trump exceptionalism. Trump doesn’t qualify for a mental disorder, but he does present with one of the world’s best-documented cases of lifelong failure to mature. He is a boy/man who expects everything to go his way and experiences the world as an extension of himself. Other people exist only to do his imperious bidding, admire his great deeds, and gratify his enormous wants. This is perfectly age-appropriate behavior in a young child, but is perfectly inappropriate in a president. Trump fancies himself the nation’s Big Brother, but he is really our neediest Big Baby. Trump is bad, not mad, but we the people are mad for having elected such a terribly flawed person to the most powerful position in the world. His heady rise was surprisingly undeterred by his consistent pattern of boldfaced lying; constant flip-flopping; irresponsible incitement to violence; and self-congratulatory bigotry, racism, and sexism. Blustering, bullying, and bravado play well on reality TV but can be disastrous in real life when you are running a country. No one less qualified to be president has ever won the office. No one so dangerous to our democracy has ever been given its most powerful position.

Trump is an unlikely messenger bearing an unwelcome message about the sanity of our body politic. He has revealed and unleashed a deeper streak of delusional denial in a larger segment of U.S. society than even I would have thought possible. Thomas More’s hope for a utopian America has decayed into a Trumpian dystopia. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” (stolen, appropriately enough, from Ronald Reagan) disguises policies that in fact make America small, fearful, angry, petty, and vicious. Karl Marx once quipped, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The Trump phenomenon marks what I dearly hope will be a bottom in both American tragedy and farce.

Democracy is a precious, but historically infrequent and perilously fragile method of governance. Athens initiated democratic government, but its brief experiment ended in failure when the people were seduced by demagogues into disastrous decisions. Plato believed democracy to be so unworkable an institution that he banned it from his ideal Republic. When forerunners of Western democracy began emerging four hundred years ago, the philosophers Hobbes and Vico predicted they would inevitably lead to chaos and a return to all-powerful central control. The last three hundred years have proved democracy to be the best of governments when it works well, the worst when bedeviled by divisiveness, disorganization, chaos, and corruption. The world now contains dozens of failed “democracies” in the midst of, or verging toward, civil war, anarchy, and/or totalitarian takeover. There is an old Islamic quotation: “Better one hundred years of the Sultan’s tyranny than one year of people’s tyranny over each other.”

Apart from our own brutal Civil War, U.S. democracy has seemed a charmed bedrock of stability — surviving mass migrations, periodic depressions, and stark economic inequality. But the future holds no guarantees. When, forty years ago, Henry Kissinger began making small talk on first meeting Zhou Enlai, he asked his opinion on the French Revolution. Zhou replied: “too soon to tell.” Likewise, it is too soon to tell whether American democracy can survive Trump’s attack on it. He may be no more than a blowhard and buffoon, but Trump has proven to be no joke. He has embodied and unleashed forces that seriously undermine our democratic principles and institutions. Because of Trump, the Freedom House 2017 ranking of democracy has dropped the United States to the thirtieth in the world and has us trending downward.

Trump markets himself as the law-and-order candidate but has displayed a regal contempt for law whenever it contradicts his interests, impulses, whims, and grudges. He feels entitled to squash critical press, throttle judges who don’t see things his way, force the military to torture in violation of international law, and break treaty obligations. Trump doesn’t understand or respect the delicate balances built into our constitution and feels no compunction whatsoever in distorting them out of all recognition. Trump says or does at least one obnoxiously autocratic thing almost every day, but never has to pay the expected political or personal price. He once bragged, probably accurately: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose my voters.” It is but few steps from this attitude to an attempt at dictatorship.