Dear America,

This is an intervention.

You have a problem.

Donald Trump.

It’s a technique abusers use: Through manipulation and outright lies, they so disorient their target that the person (or in this case, the country) is left defenseless.

Trump is a toxic blend of Barnum and bully. If you’re a good mark, he’s your best friend. But if you catch on to the con, then he starts to gaslight. Ask him a question and he’ll lie without batting an eye. Call him a liar and he’ll declare himself “truthful to a fault.” Confront him with contradictory evidence and he’ll shrug and repeat the fib. Maybe he’ll change the subject. But he’ll never change the lie.

But forget all that, because evidence is for losers.

Political journalists have been repeatedly criticized for not confronting Trump on his lies. But of course they have. For political journalists, a politician caught in a lie is chum in the water. But when they confront Trump with his lies, he doesn’t behave like most people. He doesn’t blush or equivocate or argue. He steamrolls. He bullies. He lies some more. And the journalists don’t know what to do. They brought facts to an ego fight, and found them to be worthless weapons.

If it’s hard to wrap your mind around the gaslighting of a nation, just watch the dynamics at work on a single person: Michelle Fields. While covering a Trump rally last Tuesday, Fields was grabbed and pulled toward the ground. Ben Terris of the Washington Post reports seeing Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski do it. Fields has bruises on her forearm and there was audio of the event. Lewandowski himself reportedly told a Breitbart editor he grabbed Fields.

So what happened next?

Lewandowski said Fields was crazy. “Totally delusional,” he tweeted. Trump suggested she made the whole thing up. As my colleague Robert Schlesinger put it, “the Trump campaign pulled straight from the attack-the-victim playbook typically deployed against those who raise accusations of sexual assault – she's delusional, she's making things up, why didn't she tell the police, she has a history of this kind of behavior.”

In other words: gaslighting.

And what does this look like as he does it to an entire nation? Let’s go to Chicago, where Trump cancelled a planned appearance, resulting in a series of scuffles between outraged Trump supporters and cheering protestors.

Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show that night, Trump said law enforcement had advised him to cancel the rally out of safety concerns.

The Chicago Police Department says it never advised Trump to cancel.

Trump said, “I don't want anybody to be hurt. We want this to be a nonviolent situation.”

For more than a month Trump has been encouraging his supporters to get violent, not only spurring them to rough up protestors but offering to pay their legal fees if they are arrested for assault.

Trump said his supporters only fight back in self-defense – just three days after a Trump supporter was caught on tape sucker-punching a protester who was being led out of a rally.

Hannity – who has been gaslighting America a lot longer than Trump, but less effectively – said, “When did we start blaming victims of violence instead of the perpetrators of violence?”

Ask Corey Lewandowski.

The best way to end gaslighting is to sever ties with the abuser. Some Republicans are trying to do this, but it seems like the GOP is stuck with Trump, at least through July, probably until November.