If you are not a resident of the New York City metroplex, it is quite possible that you knew very little about one Donald J. Trump except that he was the host of a reality show. Of course, typical of the life of Trump, there was nothing real about that show, just as there was nothing real about Trump University or the his vision of successful casinos….you get the idea. So it should not be surprising that the reality of the Trump presidency is swathed in unreality.

As soon as he was inaugurated in January of 2017, he began his presidency by lying about the size of the crowd that attended his swearing in. In ensuing two and half years the Washington Post has recording him lying over 12,000 times. There has literally never been a president who has lied as much as Trump – his mendacity is unreal……except that it is real.

We have never had a president who has treated misogyny and racism as ordinary aspects of his daily language. And while it would seem to be unreal that his defamatory, inflammatory and plain disgusting daily tweets are being issued by the President of the United States……..they are real.

And now, as we learn more about the muck and mud of Trump’s attempt to strong arm the president of Ukraine to help him smear his political enemy, we realize that there is nothing unreal about Trump’s behavior. Indeed, in some bizarre and unreal way he seems to have no shame, and indeed has misplaced pride, that he has behaved in such a nefarious fashion.

He has not even given us the decency of lying about his now infamous phone call – freely releasing the transcript of the call and then telling us not to believe our lying eyes as we read the words that can only be interpreted and threatening, bullying and clearly seeking to damage Joe Biden with the assistance of the Ukrainian government.

The water torture-like drip of revelations of Trump’s dishonest, misleading and obscene behavior coupled with his incredible disregard of presidential norms and the Constitution should be enough to warrant his impeachment several times overs. But Trump has become a master of misdirection and distraction. Even as the evidence mounts that he used the foreign policy powers of the presidency to attempt to advance his own personal political interests, Trump is the one hurling words like “treason” as if they were toxic manhole covers that will obliterate his opponents and the mounting opposition to his presidency.

And now it appears that more and more members of the Executive Branch are coming to understand how dangerous Trump is, and how much the system of government that we know is in trouble. And when we learn that Trump seriously proposed that, instead of building a wall at the Mexican border, a canal should be installed complete with snakes and alligators, we can understand that deranged would be an improved condition for this man.

Asking the Australian Prime Minister to dig up dirt on Hilary Clinton so that Trump can follow through on his “Lock Her Up” chant is not some fevered dream out of the right wing echo chamber, it is the confirmed conversation of the Donald Trump in his role as president of the United States. And it is clear that we are long past the time to be worried – we should be alarmed.

Things have gotten so bad that it is not even clear that Trump would leave the White House if he were impeached and convicted or even if he lost the election in November of 2020. The transition of presidential power, no matter how bitter the political differences has never been at question — until now — and it can only be hoped that responsible men and women on both sides of the aisle and throughout the federal government have a plan.

When the history of the Trump presidency is told years from now, we can only hope that the courage and intelligence of all three branches of government will be the heroes in limiting the damage that this man is doing to the United States government and to the people that he so falsely swore to serve and protect.