And the letting down of his worshipers begins.

The calls of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” had become a rallying cry for Trumplings, as they hoped to see Hillary Clinton face the justice that has eluded her for her entire career.

Trump as good as promised them that he would be the hand that delivered justice, once they trusted him with their vote.

Yet when Trump took the stage early on Wednesday morning, he notably did not mention going after his Democratic rival.

Instead, Trump took a much softer tone during his brief remarks, which came after 3:00 a.m.

“Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country,” Trump said. “I mean that very sincerely.”

“Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division — we’ve got to get together,” he added. “It is time for us to come together as one united people.”

Trump campaign’s manager Kellyanne Conway said later in the morning that Trump “did not discuss [a special prosecutor] last night since his victory,” though she refused to rule out the possibility.

“He certainly didn’t address it with Mrs. Clinton on the phone,” she said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Gratitude for her service to our country?

What service would that be, since, according to you, she was a scandal-plagued disaster, who allowed ISIS to rise and four Americans to die in Benghazi.

She was a scoundrel who put our nation’s security at risk with her mishandling of classified emails.

She has used the Clinton Foundation as a piggy bank to enrich herself, and not those it purports to help.

I guess birds of a feather, and all that.

To some degree, Trump appears to be caught in a bind between the passionate enthusiasm of his supporters, who have salivated over the prospect of an indictment against Clinton, and legal norms that would view a new investigation as political retribution that violated the sanctity of the democratic system.

Republicans were livid this summer, when the Justice Department announced that it would not file charges against Clinton or her allies over the personal email setup. Although it determined Clinton had been “extremely careless,” there was not enough evidence to claim that laws protecting sensitive information had been broken, FBI Director James Comey claimed in July.

This is true. Maybe Trump realizes the bluster of the campaign trail is very different than the realities of serving.

Or maybe it’s safe to drop the act and embrace his dear friend, anew.

To examine exactly what Trump said:

“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” Trump told Clinton during a debate in October. “Because there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it. And we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

Had he already been president, Trump added, “you would be in jail.”

We owe her a major debt of gratitude.

How do those statements align, exactly?

They don’t, because he was just saying what his glassy-eyed followers wanted to hear. He was playing a role to get their vote. Hillary Clinton was flawed enough, and the Obama administration was an accessory to restraining justice to the point that anger at the system overcame any commonsense examination of Trump’s bravado.

Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman in the Obama administration who backed Clinton for president, agreed that Trump wouldn’t be likely to reopen the Clinton case.

“That’s one of the things I say is hard to imagine,” he said. “Because the way that Trump talks about the Justice Department and how he would handle it in his administration flies so in the face of the existing practices to ensure independence, that it’s hard to see how it would work.”

“If he were to govern in the way he’s campaigned, I think you would see mass resignations at DOJ.”

With the DOJ as it is now, mass resignations might not be a bad idea, given what we’ve seen from them under slimy Loretta Lynch, but as it is, I don’t think any of them have anything to worry about.

Trump never meant a word of what he said.