The extent to which Donald Trump dominates our news cycle and thus our politics was nicely captured over Labor Day weekend, when his absence from the public eye for only a couple of days led to rumors of his demise.

Having become such a frenetic presence in our lives, we assume something is amiss if we don't see him leading our newscasts morning, afternoon and night.

Once upon a time, long ago in what now seems like an alternative universe, it was possible to write political columns the old-fashioned way: by taking a position on an issue of the day and explaining why you saw it that way, hopefully persuasively.

Now it seems like all discussion of government and public policy must be filtered in some way through a Trump prism, even if Trump doesn't have a position on a particular issue or if whatever position he does have will change by tomorrow and then be forgotten the day after that.

You are expected to write about Trump, because if you write about something other than Trump you are ignoring the existential threat that he supposedly presents to our democracy (a phrase which, when invoked, invariably signals forthcoming pearl-clutching sanctimony).

If you write columns about Trump that are critical of him, as this columnist has done so often, you are still a "Trumper" if you were........

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