By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A friend of mine who lives in Australia has strong feelings about Donald J. Trump. They are so strong, I at times am compelled to share them with you.

He wrote me this weekend to comment on the election and what might await Trump as he exits the White House. My friend writes, in brief:

I dearly, dearly hope that when Trump eventually leaves the White House and Inauguration Day is done, that he is arrested and paraded publicly in handcuffs on whatever multitude of charges currently await him.

The spell he holds over his followers and enablers has to be broken somehow. If not arrested, then humiliation through other means … bankruptcy and/or divorce … a very nasty, messy public divorce … “

Ouch, man!

I don’t expect that to happen. I don’t really even want it to happen to our former president. The “spell” to which my friend refer does need to break into a million pieces. How might that occur without having to send Trump to the slammer?

I happen to agree with my friend about the need to break that spell. My strongest hope is that it will dissipate once it becomes clear that a former president has none of the actual power of the current president and only can speak for himself instead of for the nation.

This might sound naive, but my hope would be that Trump’s relevance will evaporate naturally. I don’t hold out much hope that the Trumpkins will accept that their hero’s defeat came from a wholesale rejection of the man himself, his behavior, the manner in which he conducted himself while representing a nation full of citizens most of whom never endorsed his becoming president in the first place.

Then again, I could be proven wrong on this … just as Trump himself proved me wrong by being elected president in 2016.