Eight years ago, I was perhaps overly optimistic when I wrote in an editorial for my old newspaper, the Daily Inter Lake, that Donald Trump’s first inaugural address was a promise that “politics as usual would come to a grinding halt in Washington, D.C.”

Overly optimistic? Heck, I was dead wrong.

Instead we got more than two years of the worst kind of politics – the politics of personal destruction – as Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies planted the seeds of the Russia collusion hoax, leading to the failed Mueller probe, then another two years marked by a pair of partisan impeachments and divided government. In every regard, Trump became the lightning rod for false accusations and calumny.

He was branded as an illegitimate president by his political enemies and was forced to endure, to borrow Hamlet’s phrasing, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

When he took the lesson he learned from his opponents........

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