“We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you.”

Here’s the second: “This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep! Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle….. They’re mine. I own ’em. They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for them.”

And finally: “The stresses set up by the social changes wrought by the advent of technology are straining the structure of civilization beyond the limits of tolerance. The machine does our work for us and meekly comes and goes at our bidding. But it inexorably demands its wages.”

The answers are: the first dates from 1976 and is from the extraordinary Sidney Lumet movie “Network,” written by Paddy Chayefsky. The second, from 1957, appears in the equally prescient Elia Kazan movie “A Face in the Crowd,” written by Budd Schulberg. (Watch them both if you want to understand Trump.) The third dates from 1938. It’s a passage from my father’s high school magazine in Johannesburg that I stumbled on while researching my last book. “Civilization,” of course, would collapse a year later when Hitler invaded Poland.

“Network” traces the apotheosis of a news anchor, Howard Beale, who goes off-script on TV, raging against the world and television — their lies and manipulations — and develops a following with his unforgettable cri de coeur: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” His ratings, previously in a dive, soar. “A Face in the Crowd” also follows a media sensation, Lonesome Rhodes, who parlays his charm and popular touch into a meteoric rise to national television. He is a fraud, with startling instincts for human weakness, who takes everyone in.

Beale, whose rise begins when he announces he will commit suicide live on TV, succumbs in the end to the terrible logic of his success when he is assassinated during his show.

Rhodes is undone by a hot mic as he dissects the idiocy of the Americans he has entranced: “Those morons out there? Shheh, I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to ’em for caviar. I can make them eat dog food and they’ll think it’s steak ... You know what the public’s like? A cage full of guinea pigs."

Somewhere, a hot mic is waiting for Trump. Its name might be the Mueller investigation, whose painstaking nature is making him hotheaded. People are dumb, but they know when their president is compromised. As a wise man once observed, “You can’t fool all the people all the time.”