Our nation’s honor is the greatest casualty of the Trump era — but it must be resuscitated.

The U.S. is far from perfect, but we have a nearly perfect document called the Constitution by which honorable men and women have agreed to abide, an honor code that each member of Congress has adopted, and indeed, an electoral system that has more or less allowed only men and women who are capable of honoring this code to positions of power.

Trump was never such a man.

I will go my grave not understanding why this wasn’t obvious or didn’t matter to half the electorate.

Trump will go away, after squandering our resources and causing irreparable damage and division within the United States, but the anarchists, white nationalists, QAnons, fake news junkies, and other deplorables his rhetoric has empowered, will not. And now, some of these people waltzed into government. Some walked with the insurrectionists, some cheered them on, many are now preparing to defend their assault on our Capitol.

For four years, even in the face of obvious corruption, obstruction of justice, and treasonous dealings, Trump was afforded all the courtesies, respect and protections that was afforded to the 43 Presidents before him. Yet Trump exploited the good will developed by these men to shield himself from consequence and our systems of accountability could not cope with it.

This business-as-usual approach helped fool some 40% of the American people, who believed that they were smart enough (but weren’t) to detect a grifter, to separate fact from fiction, to avoid being bamboozled, to choose a fit candidate. Because commitment to our constitutional processes is so strong, and because our media landscape is pockmarked with indecency, these people didn’t see Trump being kicked to the curb the many times he should have been, thus adding credibility to his game, empowering him time and again. They suffer not from a disbelief in honor but an inability to detect it in real humans and this brought our democracy to the brink.

So let me say what the media and our lawmakers cannot say. Trump, for all his actions and rhetoric, is an enemy of the state. Yet we have stood by, mouths agape, paralyzed with cognitive dissonance as he raped and pillaged our coffers, evaded our laws, degraded our norms and institutions, shredded our shared sense of community, and led hundreds of thousands of us toward harm. He may be jumping off the train, but the goons that clung to his buffet car march on, fighting for the sake of “freedom” but determined to restrict it to people of their likeness.

The guardrails of our Constitution aren’t strong enough to hold against dishonorable men and disinformation. Those in charge of keeping the President in line were capable of no further remedy and the dishonesty of his enablers kept him in power. As it turns out, when you’re a star, or sucking up to one, they let you do it, you can do anything, even dismantle a democratic republic.

Trump’s legacy is one of incalculable loss and an actual, corporeal body count — to which four more bodies were added yesterday. (We won’t forget the first, nor the children).

Almost dead, but hooked on life support, is HONOR — but it must be resuscitated. We can no longer equate Honor with wealth. We can’t allow dishonorable people into our Chamber just because they found an audience allowed by the failings the of social media giants. And we certainly can’t place lifelong veterans of dishonorable conduct into the Oval Office — we must be ready when he, or someone like him, runs again in 2024.

While Americans have great diversity in thought and experience, a wide range in wealth and opportunity, Honor is one constant that we all can share. Commitment to the Constitution is another. If we accept no further compromise on these two principles, we may retain our democracy.

So while our divided nation tries to discern fact from fiction, we must also cultivate and believe in a shared vision of Honor. This means being able to identify Honor, recognize real from pretend Honor, elect men and women capable of acting honorably, and holding dishonorable people to account as we try to put this miserable chapter behind us.

Surely, a focus on these principles never would have allowed a thrice-divorced, five-times bankrupt, cheating-with-a-porn-star grifter who faked Time covers and masqueraded as a publicist on the radio to brag about himself into the People’s House.

The inmates have taken over the asylum, it’s time to take it back.