Let my begin by recapping what we all know: Donald Trump is an evil man. He’s a malignant narcissist, which means that he’s incapable of feeling love, empathy, compassion, or even basic respect for other people. His relationships are purely transactional; driven by lust and greed; and by his craving for power and adulation. He comes from a long line of racists, and continues the family tradition. He is a misogynist. He has no discernible values and no moral compass. He has no respect for, or interest in, factual reality; and he has a remarkable ability to convince himself that the ‘truth” is whatever he wants to believe at the moment. He’s a sadist and a bully; his “policies” are solely about getting revenge against anyone who has crossed him, and grinding his enemies under his heel. The purity of his evil is undiluted by any capacity for shame or guilt, by common sense, or by any capacity for humor. And no other white man in the country is as incapable of dancing as he is.

He knows nothing about American history or our Constitution, and he can’t govern his way out of a paper bag. Yet this is the man whom a majority of the electorate chose to be the President of our country. When all is said and done, he’s a simple man: his cult followers are much harder to understand. To millions of them he is a savior figure, specifically chosen by God to save America. As long as I live, I’ll never understand how so many people can be so completely deluded and so thoroughly conned. But I gave up trying to understand them many years ago, and have finally come to accept the fact that I never will. The American electorate has made its choice, and those of us who aren’t under his spell are left to live our lives in a country in which half of our fellow citizens have lost their minds.

Like everything else, the cult of Trump will one day come to an end. We can’t know how that will happen, or how much suffering and damage the MAGA movement will inflict before they and he are finally gone. In the meantime, we’re called not to get caught up in the general lunacy, not to abandon common sense, and to commit to continue to live in the light of our shared values — that the truth is something that deserves our allegiance; that love of others and service to our communities matter; that freedom, justice and equality are worth fighting for; and that kindness and ordinary human decency are worth cultivating. We won’t abandon our values because Trump and the MAGA cult spit on them. In the dark time in our history that lies ahead, it behooves us all to keep the light burning in our hearts.