Bear with me here.

I’m just channeling the alt-Right, at least in style.

If Donald Trump and Fox News and The National Enquirer can all just stipulate fully unsubstantiated things as true in broad daylight, so can I. Fair’s fair, right?

So, I’m going to stipulate something, but unlike those other guys it’s actually buttressed by quite a bit of solid circumstantial evidence. Still, I doubt the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, PolitiFact and all the other reputable truth sleuths would give it a pass.

However, in the giddy, anarchic spirit of the post-truth moment, I am going to just spew my intuitive theory, which, of course, is just as good as anyone’s with an even partially functioning brain, right? Free speech, yeah!

The hypothesis

Here’s my big idea:

When Donald Trump decided to run for president of the United States a few years back he actually was a joke. Everyone knew he was a self-important buffoon because he had for decades been famous specifically for his self-important buffoonery. He had zero political experience and was renowned for his personal and intellectual amorality and shallowness.

He just didn’t know it.

But as he started doing his thing on the campaign trail, ultra-conservative, alt-Right-type political Machiavellis (Stephen Bannon, et al.) noticed with a sudden jump in their pulse rates that people were actually responding to this clueless, mean-spirited, narcissistic show-off. Like, bigly.

Hmmm, they thought to themselves, imagining the political possibilities if appalled by he man himself.

These slinking political operatives were extremely smart, focused, ethically untethered folks who saw — and seized — what they reasonably viewed as the opportunity of a lifetime for Tea Party-type conservative extremists to take over the Republican party and, perhaps, the whole of government.

Holy cow!

Pumping up the crowds

So then appear the likes of pit-bull-like Corey Lewandowski, racism monger Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, a Hungarian-American poseur of pseudo-intellectual gravitas. These guys and others turbo-charged Trump’s campaign rallies, encouraging the president to encourage his aficionados to beat up people who disagreed with him. “I’d punch ‘em in the face,” Mr. Trump suggested.

Things went even better than expected.

The debates

In the GOP presidential campaign debates, Trump’s handlers urged (or didn’t discourage) his penchant for insult and meanness, and he predictably started demeaning every candidate he could. Mario Rubio was “Little Marco,” Jeb Bush was “Low-Energy Jeb,” and so forth. At the first 2016 campaign debate he dismissively poo-pooed co-moderator Megyn Kelly for even bringing up a litany of his own misogynist statements disparaging women over years (here’s the video.)

“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals …” Kelly started to say to Trump.

He interrupted her misogynistically, pointing out, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” Which got a huge laugh from the mostly Republican crowd.

Kelly then put on the record that Mr. Trump’s nasty comments about women extended well beyond what he had said about the comedian O’Donnell, and she asked how those comments were helpful in getting women’s votes in the coming election. He responded,

“I think the big problem this country has is with political correctness. … and I frankly don’t have time for political correctness.”

Which got an even huger positive response from the audience.

Then later, at 2:40 a.m. after the debate, Trump teeted: “Wow, @megynkelly really bombed tonight. People are going wild on twitter! Funny to watch.”

Very presidential

Despite the curiously affirmative response, Trump was, in fact, expressing hostility and superiority towards women, and disgust with common decency and civility.

We want those two traits in all our presidents, it goes without saying, right?

Afterward, Trump’s handlers, constantly puffing up his own sense of political genius and grandiosity, turbo-charged his natural impulses. The crowds loved it. Trumpies didn’t seem to care if their guy was clearly woman-hating, racist, hostile to the immigrants (who have actually made America great), adulterous, law scoffing, integrity-less and, most of all, an ignorant big fat liar.

And so it went throughout the campaign. During the primary, sane, discriminating people of both parties still thought Trump was a joke but now a dangerous one. But, of course, we were sure Republicans would never elect such a terrible person to lead them and the country. Would they? Yes, they would, it turned out. Hell, yes.

The general election

It was even more demoralizing in the general election, when Trump’s handlers ensured that their man continued being the divisive, racist, fear-mongering rascal that at core he is. Clinton became “Crooked Hilary,” as Trump and the GOP disingenuously criminalized her non-crime email habits.

Trump continued spewing not just lies but provable ones and other deceptions at his rallies to strangely adoring crowds. What’s wrong with Americans, the rest of us asked ourselves with growing concern for the future?

Then he was elected president and continued with his same incurious, bigoted, misogynist ways, with the faithful still swooning in thrall, reinforcing our new leader’s dangerously and delusively high opinion of himself.

Meanwhile, his handlers high-fived each other in private, knowing that they had successfully orchestrated the election of a president akin to Chance, the simple-minded gardener in the film Being There who became the unlikely trusted advisor to a powerful Washington insider. Gardener in the film is completely clueless, but Americans project their own irrational desires onto him.

As is happening right now with President Trump. Think I’m exaggerating? When asked by a reporter during the campaign, he didn’t even know what the “nuclear triad” is. Or that women getting an abortion could not be jailed for it.

Deer in the headlights

Here’s the crux of my theory:

Right up to the day he was elected, I think Mr. Trump believed he would lose (that’s why he spent so much energy dissing the election as “rigged”). When soon after the election he found himself sitting next to Barack Obama in the Oval Office, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more uncomfortable, deer-in-the-headlight moment for a new president. I saw terror in his eyes. I really did.

I’m sure his handlers were all thinking, oh God, just don’t say anything stupid.

But in very short order, it appeared Donald Trump seemed to become very comfortable being president, as if it was all do to his supreme supremeness. His scurrying minions behind the scenes knew better.

Today, more than a year into his presidency, the illusion seems to be wearing thin, and his house of cards appears to be teetering.

The book

A new book, Fear, by respected journalism icon and Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, reportedly buttressed by hundreds of hours of voluntary tape recordings of high-level current and former White House officials, concludes that those who serve the president question whether he has the intelligence, competence, judgment and moral integrity to lead the country. Worse, the book claims that some of his staff take important papers off his desk before he can sign them, purportedly to protect the nation, a tactic that is being called an “administrative coup.”

The next day, the New York Times, one of the world’s most widely respected newspapers despite Trump’s habit of putting “the failing” in front of it, published the first anonymous op-ed in its history. The Times said it felt the information it contained was necessary for people to read.

In short, the op-ed, written by a current White House “senior official” representing a group of Trump-wary staff insurgents, basically seconded what is charged in Woodward’s book: that the president’s profoundly deep deficits of character and knowledge pose an existential danger to the republic.

‘You lose.’

The president is furious at the disloyalty. Don’t they know how great he is?

He immediately made a public statement at the White House as he hosted visiting state law enforcement officials, accusing the op-ed writer of cowardice and subterfuge and the “failing New York Times” of malfeasance for publishing it. He falsely added that he has done more for the country so far in his tenure than any other president in history and that nobody has a chance of unseating him in 2020. I suspect his handlers, who know better, were wincing. This was not how it was supposed to go.

The Trump presidency reminds me of that classic 1972 political movie “The Candidate.” Right before he agreed to run, the charismatic but inexperienced Democrat senate hopeful in the film, Bill McKay (played by Robert Redford), was given a guarantee by his would-be campaign manager, Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle). Written on the inside of a matchbook, it read: “You lose.” Both knew it was a hopeless quest against a popular incument. But he won.

In the final scene (here’s a video), just after McKay’s victory was publicly declared, McKay turned to his campaign manager and, with a look akin to terror, asked him, “What do we do now?”

But in the mad crush of people celebrating the win, Lucas couldn’t hear him.

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