After giving the matter some thought, I have decided that I’ve become unsuited to the low art of writing newspaper columns any longer. My deficiencies to participate in the current conversation are many.

For one thing, I have never listened to a podcast. I prefer reading things, a more efficient way to gather and retain information. So while I’ve heard of this Joe Rogan fellow, I’ve no good idea what he’s all about. I gather he endorsed Trump, and that’s enough for me. But then I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on my truck radio sometimes, and generally found him preposterous. I gather Rogan has inherited his audience of ignorant soreheads and members of the “I hate girls” club—yearning desperately for female companionship, but ashamed to admit it.

Furthermore, I do not own, and have never wanted, an iPhone. My sainted wife, maybe the least “tech savvy” person you could ever meet, spends a great deal of time struggling with hers, arguing constantly with that snippy bitch Siri.

I get by with a steam-powered flip phone which rings about twice a week—normally somebody I’m not eager to talk to.

Gifted with the fashion sense of a cowherd, I have never wanted to become an “influencer” anyway. When I really want to dress up, I go with L.L. Bean.

Just the other day, I encountered the online meanderings of one Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer who came up with a brilliant idea: “What if instead of a vaccine we just were able to get exposed to a weak version of the virus that enabled us to build the antibodies we need to fight the real thing?”

Yeah, what if? Here is how Wikipedia defines the term: “A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe….The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat.”

Talk about reinventing the wheel!

Something else I learned courtesy of Kevin Drum’s invaluable website is that fewer than half of Republicans in an Axios/Ipsos poll say they trust the Center for Disease Control for health information. Sixty-eight percent trust Donald Trump.

Don’t tell me it’s not a cult.

So yes, the main reason I’m calling it quits as a newspaper columnist—this will be my last outing in this space—is Donald Trump, the incompetent sociopath and career criminal who’s gotten himself elected president of the United States. I’m not afraid of him; my contempt is absolute. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking and writing about him.

That a near-majority thought him worthy of the presidency is too depressing to contemplate. One way or another, Trump will bring the American experiment to ruins. But nothing says I have to chronicle the catastrophe. I only get one life.

The happy misanthrope and Baltimore Sun columnist H.L Mencken predicted all this more than a century ago. “On some great and glorious day,” Mencken wrote in 1917 “the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Dudes, we’re there. Donald Trump isn’t merely ignorant, he exists in fear and loathing of anybody who’s not.

“The most costly of all follies” Mencken wrote on another occasion, “is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte put it this way after watching one of those televised focus groups from the heartland on CNN: ““What quickly becomes evident about the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary, it's a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS.”

When chronicles are written about the decline and fall of the American republic, the opening chapters will no doubt describe the founding of Fox News and the cowardly inability of other news organizations to confront the reality of a Soviet-Style propaganda network in their midst.

But they won’t be written by me, because I’ve reached the end of my rope. I do want to thank my editors in Kansas City and at newspapers large and small who have published my work over the years. Also, the many kind readers who have written inquiring about my health and commenting upon my work. Thanks as well for the brilliance and dedication of the medical professionals (Indian immigrants many of them) who have restored my health and congenital optimism over the past year, I do look forward to haranguing my poor wife Diane and innocent civilians down at the dog park instead of churning out newspaper columns.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.