Would you regret if tomorrow you found out that Donald Trump committed suicide? No chance of that with such a narcicist.

If he found the courage to die somehow out of a fear of torture or imprisonment I would be extremely sorry and unhappy, not out of charity or anything like that but for the same reason I was sorry and unhappy about the demise of Lee Harvey Oswald. File it under the rubric, “Now we’ll never know.”

Mr Trump himself is what he always was, a vulgar con man who found his niche as a bad example, a cruel reality TV showoff, a kind of zoo animal so repulsive you can’t look away. As a New Yorker I’ve watched him out of the corner of my eye since around 1980. It was always a given that he’d continue to act out his bad-boy shtick as president — cartoonists imagined him in that role way back when. (See Gary Trudeau’s oldies, collected in the book “Yuge!”) Once he took office he became a sort of catalyst, triggering changes in American governance without being changed himself.

Now we’re learning how that happened. The underlying theme seems to be Russia, and I for one want to know just how deep the Russian penetration of our government has gone. It seems clear Mr Trump is in thrall to V. Putin and/or his oligarchs, but why? How? Who else is implicated? Why was it so easy to do? Can we stop it from happening again?

Viva Mr Trump! Long may he live! He’s an asset as precious to us as he is to Mr Putin. We’re beginning to understand some of the mysteries behind his rise to power and the Republican embrace of his unsavory self. It would be tragic to lose the key to such mysteries just when we’re on the brink of unlocking them.