AWP rhymes with gawp, and that’s what he also wanted: To be stared at, talked about, catered to, the center of fawning attention, unforgettably present, dominating the news, astride the world in which the news is made. He wanted applause. His ravenous insecurity — narcissism — inflated his ego to continental size. In effect, in his authoritarian imagination, the “extremely stable genius” that he called himself deserved to be the indispensable “me” in “America,” without which the country’s name and the country itself would crumble.

The roars and chants of Trump’s crowds slaked his thirst for veneration. But they imprisoned him in his “base.” By satisfying his craving to be idolized, they gave him no reason to convince the unimpressed. How much more gratifying it must have been for him to bask in mass flattery at rallies than to engage in the difficult business of persuading the uncommitted. That would have taken assets he lacked: empathy, knowledge, intelligence, and a willingness not to lie.

So how could Americans have elected such a demagogue? Trump was corrupt but charismatic. He broke the rules. He said whatever was on his mind. He appealed to the streak of individualism in American culture. He ran his campaign and his presidency as a mass entertainment featuring a lone patriot fighting a “deep state” controlled by globalist elites.

Especially in rural areas between Silicon Valley and the Boston-to-Washington corridor, millions of white Americans felt threatened by the transfer of jobs from physical toward mental labor in a computerized society whose racial make-up was increasingly non-white. Globalization fed those anxieties. Trump stoked them. He promised to end them and “make America great again.”

Joe Biden defeated Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College — respectively by 4.4 and 13.7 percent. Biden’s margins were narrower than one might have wished, given the blatant flaws in Trump’s character, including the 30,573 false or misleading claims that he made during his presidency as tracked and noted by The Washington Post. The egregiousness of his behavior is, however, a double testament to America’s democratic system: to its failure to select a less despicable leader, yes, but also to its success in providing the lawful framework within which his desperate effort to stage what in Latin America would be called an autogolpe or “self-coup” could be and was overcome.

On Feb. 1, watching television at his 126-room estate in Palm Beach, Florida, ex-president Trump would have learned of the coup in Myanmar and might have envied Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

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