For the past six years, I’ve been grappling with the same unsettling mix of feelings: horror at Donald Trump’s presidency, incredulousness at what happened at the capital, relief when the most damning evidence of Trumpian misdeeds came to light and a near-religious hope that the GOP might return to something resembling sanity. My nervous optimism persisted through the run-up to the midterms, with its loud predictions of an apocalypse, and after the election, had a brief moment of actual confidence. But this week, as I watched Trump announce his candidacy for 2024, that optimism was eclipsed by a more persistent, nagging realization: Trump was never president.

I don’t mean literally. He did serve a term, though he violated so many oaths and protocols of the office — and of simple decency — that many Americans (including me) took to saying that he was not president, as a kind of protest.

But I’ve come to believe that […]