It was the first non-peaceful transfer of power in American history. In over two centuries, it remains unprecedented, the most grotesque assault on democratic processes by a single president in history… That Trump clearly put the lives of cops, Senators and his own vice-president in danger was, of course, of no concern for him. No lives apart from his own have ever mattered to him…

There has never been a president who has done any of this: express contempt for the democracy he leads, refuse to accept the legitimate results of an election, and attempt to stay in power by marshaling violence in the streets. There are no parallels among any first-world modern democracies for this kind of behavior by a head of state or prime minister. No Western leader, after losing an election, has ever insisted he actually won it in a landslide — and refused to grant any legitimacy to his successor. It is such a grotesque violation of a president’s oath of office that, only a few years ago, it would have been deemed an impossibly far-fetched scenario.

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Non-degenerate political observers search and search for words accurate and strong enough to convey the moral depravity of this person. All feel (I dare say) the same sense of linguistic inadequacy. No one — not Mencken, not Murdoch, not Hitchens, not Arendt, not Didion, not Orwell, not even James Baldwin, whose writing so astonished wee UD when she encountered it in high school and has never stopped astonishing her — no one had or has the political and writerly chops to really express the disgust and shock attendant upon realizing that the leader of your country is not only vile, but arguably one of the vilest people in the world.

All of us who were more or less properly raised were taught (I dare say) to ignore, to socially annihilate, the worst of the worst, the vilest of the vile, especially those among the vile who held positions of power and were therefore able to marshal their vileness to produce real destruction. They had to be so radically isolated as to be without scope for action. Indeed many of us have dealt with the sometimes close-to-unmanageable emotions the cruelty of this man has inspired by altogether shifting our attention away from him, somehow in some sort of sad magic trick trying to make him go poof. Almost as many people, though, revel in his viciousness and want to keep him front and center.

Among rockhard reactionaries and erstwhile idolators it’s largely women so far – Lynn Cheney, Nikki Haley – who have finally, for cynical or authentic reasons, cracked.

Anyway Andrew Sullivan, up there, found the word “grotesque” and ran with it.

comically or repulsively ugly or distorted

incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree

It’s a good choice, a promising direction, grotesque. It captures the continued disbelief many of us harbor in regard to the full sharp slap of a president who seems to have tried to kill his vice-president and other political leaders in order to establish a tyranny. Comically and repulsively ugly and distorted in the feathered and tattooed bodies of the insurrectionists who tried to kill in the name of their beloved. Inappropriate to such a shocking degree that we still refuse to let ourselves be slapped that hard. As my congressional representative, Jamie Raskin, smacks my face again and again with it, I still – even now – try to dodge the blows.

Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.

Let’s face the music and dance.

These are UD‘s mantras; she recites them to herself all the time. Only she lacks the courage to live by them.