You may remember Election Night 2016 was destined to mark victory for the ex-first lady to return in triumph to the White House as president. 

But then, amazingly, Trump’s Rust Belt strategy worked — just barely — and he became the first Republican to capture Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 28 years. 

Clinton, who’d taken those states largely for granted, was so shattered mentally and emotionally that her campaign chairman, John Podesta, had to explain to the country she would (could) not speak until morning. (Feels like we dodged a bullet there.)

Since then, the nation has witnessed the sordid Russiagate hoax, countless Deep State leaks designed to undermine Trump’s authority, character, and image, and not one but two impeachment trials by a Democrat House led by a grizzled Nancy Pelosi.

And don’t forget Trump's crippling total ban from social media, which backfired on liberals because it let his angry tweets largely fade from voter memory.

With unusual unanimity, the Supreme Court blew up numerous state efforts to keep Trump off the ballot. And now, as he has locked up the GOP nomination, we’re witnessing not one, not two, not three, but four attempts to defeat Trump without voters through lawfare and to incinerate his campaign and personal finances through millions of dollars in legal fees and fines.

I have praised the former president here for his impressive record in office, actually keeping virtually all his campaign promises. 

He created the economic, regulatory, and psychological atmosphere for millions of new jobs, energy independence, restored military strength, renewed support for Israel, and constructed an enduring conservative judiciary. 

He quieted the southern border chaos. And his sometimes unpredictable diplomacy kept foreign adversaries off-balance while spurring allies to strengthen their own defenses.

I have also been critical here of the former president for his lack of political and rhetorical discipline, engaging in way too many unnecessary brawls and hyperbolic outbursts. They spawned a widespread and disconcerting sense of turmoil that made good old Joe Biden, despite ominous warning signs, seem like a reasonable, safe alternative in 2020.

What we got instead was a radically leftist 81-year-old mental cripple who demonstrates now in virtually every public appearance the disturbing and growing limits of an aged mind and body. He has no business holding any title other than Grandpa, let alone commander in chief of our brave, selfless volunteers.

Many of his decisions and policies, indeed, seem intentionally destructive to the country he leads — i.e., the open southern border.

Biden shakes hands with and salutes invisible people. He can’t remember names, including his vice president, whom he often calls president. 

He makes inappropriate remarks and wanders off into fictitious, long debunked stories and dead-end memories. During a Medal of Honor ceremony, he left the audience and recipient standing there when he simply walked out of the room before the end.

Biden exhibits strange speaking moments, such as suddenly shouting or whispering. He cannot coherently read his scripts and notes, some of which reveal the perceived staff need to remind the alleged leader of the free world to say “Hello” and then to sit down in the empty chair.

How better to distract from and cover up such disturbing behaviors reminiscent of our own decaying elderly relatives than to create a series of legal soap operas led by Democrats for sympathetic media to cover day after day and week after week throughout election year?

Surely, that will finally destroy Trump politically. And reelect what’s-his-name.

Trouble is, when Democrats announced each of four charge packages, Trump’s poll support grew. We don’t yet know the impact, if any, of a potential conviction.

One of the legal cases, in Georgia, has turned into a seamy spectacle of romantic affairs and kickbacks that place the entire process under a dark cloud of suspicion that those Democrats wanted to install over Trump’s head.

And just to ensure the former president is finished politically and financially, in one jury-free trial, the Democrat judge imposed an outrageously enormous fine that requires an outrageously enormous deposit in an outrageously short time frame before he can appeal.

The radical state judge, Arthur Engoron, is a former war protestor and, like Trump, a Queens native. He wants to establish a Trump Co. monitor of all financial activities for an alleged crime that had no victims.

And the state’s Democrat Attorney General, Letitia James, who has long vowed to get Trump one way or another, now threatens to begin seizing Trump properties in New York. That dictatorial-style overreach alone could be enough to reelect Trump.

I’ve been involved in news coverage, government service, and politics for nearly six decades. Chicago politics is rough. But I’ve never seen anything like this blatant, ugly, multi-faceted assault to “get” a political opponent. It does sound like some African or Latin American country with a fragile democracy.

The Supreme Court will soon decide if a former president has legal immunity from anything. It already ruled with unusual unanimity that states cannot keep Trump’s name off ballots.

U.S. media, of course, is not covering the country’s longest presidential race this way. They are covering it with obvious delight to chronicle in excruciating detail the enemy’s legal suffering and, oh look, get the bounteous page views that follow Trump’s name. 

We even get “Breaking News” bulletins over something as important as a Trump courthouse arrival. Anything to keep the Trump charges in the news.

It’s a conscientious thoroughness that we never see, for instance, in their coverage of the president’s son, Hunter. He’s been successfully selling influence abroad for years off his family name and now claims to be a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.

Hunter skipped paying taxes for some time, had an affair with his brother’s widow while married, wrote a book detailing his debauchery, and is now selling his “artwork” to people seeking to impress Dad. 

In short, he is an accomplished grifter receiving preferential legal treatment from his father's appointees, unlike the steamrollers targeting Trump.

I never expected one of the biggest lessons learned in this career of mine. I discovered that whatever their politics and biases, Americans possess together an invisible, yet powerful sense of collective fairness.

Conservatives often complain that liberal media tells Americans what to think. They don’t. They can’t. If they could, Republican presidents in history would not outnumber Democrat presidents.

American media can only tell Americans what to think about. Remember Monica Lewinsky? And her blue dress stained by something unmentionable?

Picturing a married president receiving oral sex from a young intern in the Oval Office is rather disgusting – unless, it seems, you’re that president.

But in 1998, Americans collectively decided that congressional Republicans under Newt Gingrich had gone too far with their impeachment and investigations of Bill Clinton’s newest sexual imbroglio. 

For the first midterm in 64 years, U.S. voters increased the House membership of an incumbent president.

I try to avoid predictions, and polls are not predictive. But looking at them even 226 days out from an election, I can understand why Democrats would be privately swallowing so many Xanax and Valiums.

A substantial majority of Americans do not want either one of these old-timers to get their party’s presidential nomination. But if that’s a given, an even larger majority do not believe Joe Biden is up to the job anymore.

He clearly won enough convention delegates in the rigged primary elections this year that were not really contests. 

But Joe Biden has spent 40 percent of his term on vacation. He has the worst job approval of any president at this point — even worse than Trump. His vice president is regarded even less.

And that team is underwater on every policy area polled — economy, foreign relations, crime, and especially immigration. 

Every poll finds nearly two-thirds think the country is headed in the Wrong Direction under Biden. 

Democrats have an abiding passion for and proven skills at getting and holding on to power in the D.C. swamp. They should, however, remember Jimmy Carter in 1980. That was the last time they offered a weak president for reelection. They were shut out of the White House for 12 long years.

Precedent suggests otherwise, but I have to suspect that either before or at the August convention in Chicago, they will devise some means to dispatch a weak Joe Biden honorably with genuinely insincere huzzahs into a full-time vacation to snooze under his little beach umbrella in Delaware.

A slight majority of Americans do believe that Trump broke the law somehow, though they’re fuzzy on details.

But Democrats are so bent on convicting Trump on something, anything, before November. I have another suspicion: If they persist in pushing their concerted lawfare cases against him with such relish, they may well face significant blowback from voters who think it’s just too much and unfair.

And then we will plainly see exactly how determined Democrats so eagerly, deftly, and stupidly turned their nemesis, the successful, loud, narcissistic, often obnoxious Donald Trump, into a sympathetic victim – and reelection victor.