So what is the defiant deviant in the White House doing these days?
Nothing at all to stem wave upon wave of new COVID infections, not even to acknowledge the human suffering or the waking nightmare of health professionals.
Nothing to exhort miserly party brethren to help millions of Americans dangling on twin ledges of eviction and hunger.
The only thing Donald Trump is doing is spewing falsehoods like a water weasel. In other words, nothing has changed since he took office one harsh January day.
This presidency never was about serving us. It was about serving Donald Trump. Now, in defeat, Trump's central motive is to tend the cult he cultivated.
In the process, he's pocketing millions of dollars from the terminally gullible who think they can blow up the election that took him down.
That cult is so deranged that Trump's worshippers can't do simple electoral math, so addled that adherents would look any way other than the evidence that the man disciples venerate is a con and crook.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden already is doing the job that more than 80 million taxpayers expect: hiring experienced and principled people, laying out policies with long-range and short-range considerations in mind.
We should cease calling Biden president-elect. From the moment the skyrockets lit the sky to signal his win, Biden has been president-in-effect.
Donald Trump has ceased being our president. Until he finds another home, he is our maleficent foster child.
"Will he won't he" talk of his attending Biden's inauguration is the most pointless matter imaginable. Let him do what he wants. Let him sulk away his last hours in the White House among the dead presidents. Let him share aerosols with his red-cap arm.
If he ever honored the terms of his employment, Trump has relinquished his station with his actions since the election. Prince Edward VIII abdicated his royalty for the love of a woman. Trump had abdicated for love of what he sees in the mirror.
Joe Biden has bigger things on which to focus. Last week he spoke to Americans about what can and should be done to address the ravages of the pandemic on the economy.
Meanwhile Trump spoke via staged video about how this thing called democracy had robbed him of four more years serving himself. (Washington Post: "Trump campaign groups spent $1.1 million at Trump properties in last days of re-election bid.")
Biden hired Anthony Fauci to help steer the nation to safer waters amid today's deadly swells.
Trump, meanwhile, can't even keep his as-seen-on-Fox-News pandemic adviser for the remaining gasps of his presidency.
Biden prodded lawmakers to make a pandemic relief package happen.
Trump threatened to veto the defense authorization bill without irrelevant-to-defense rule changes he wants in his war with Twitter. Yeah, that's a big issue facing this nation.
In her book, "Leadership in Turbulent Times," Doris Kearns Goodwin cites empathy as the central characteristics of great leaders like Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Americans have elected a man in Joe Biden who exudes empathy and models the kind of dignity that made others heroes for their countrymen.
For the last four years we have had a president who exhibits the clinical signs of narcissistic personality disorder: "excessive need for admiration, disregard for others' feelings, an inability to handle any criticism, and a sense of entitlement."
Many Republicans have ashen faces over the possibility that in Georgia the cult Trump has established is more interested in massaging his ego and abiding by his conspiracy rants than the crucial battle for control of the U.S. Senate with the two run-offs there.
It would be just like him to let political allies go down the drain if he can't have the White House for another term.
Which he can't. In word and deed – leadership -- Joe Biden is already inaugurated.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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