With 12 days left on the electoral clock, I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. Everyone outside the Trump cult is exhausted. But just remember, Trump wants us to be exhausted.

That’s his plan, such as it is. He wants to wear us down with lies, demagoguery, petty conflict, and chaos, hoping that we’ll give up and tune out. It’s another form of voter suppression. It’s literally straight from the Kremlin playbook; as the RAND Corporation detailed in a recent study, the ultimate goal is to unleash “a firehose of falsehood…rapid, continuous, and repetitive…a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions” in order to overwhelm and exhaust the citizenry.

It’s impossible to parse all the noisome chaos – whether it’s the latest disinformation about Hunter Biden, or Trump’s instant war on Leslie Stahl (?!), or him saying there’s “not much” he could’ve done differently to fight the pandemic, or his latest ignorance about wearing a mask (“some people don’t like it scientifically”), or his kind remarks about QAnon conspirators, or his baseless rants about thousands of Trump mail ballots getting dumped in creeks (never happened), or his new demand that Bill Barr open a criminal probe of the Bidens (“act fast…before the election”), or his personal lawyer getting punked in the new Borat movie – but all the chaos is precisely the point.

The good news is that Barack Obama, the last American (as opposed to Kremlin-style) president to serve this nation, addressed that dictatorial tactic during a rally in Philadelphia, and framed a simple solution:

“With Joe and Kamala at the helm, you’re not going to have to think about the crazy things they said every day. And that’s worth a lot. You’re not going to have to argue about them every day. It just won’t be so exhausting. You might be able to have a Thanksgiving dinner without having an argument. You’ll be able to go about your lives knowing that the president is not going to retweet conspiracy theories about secret cabals running the world or that Navy SEALS didn’t actually kill bin Laden…We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who doesn’t support him or threaten them with jail…

“Our democracy is not going to work if the people who are supposed to be our leaders lie every day and just make things up. And we’ve just become numb to it. We’ve just become immune to it. Every single day, fact checkers can’t keep up. And, look, this notion of truthfulness and democracy and citizenship, and being responsible, these aren’t Republican or Democratic principles, they’re American principles…

“We can’t be complacent…Voting is about making things better – not making things perfect, but putting us on track so that a generation from now we can look back and say, ‘Things got better starting now.’ And that’s what voting’s about. Voting’s about using the power we have and pooling it together to get a government that’s more concerned and more responsive and more focused on you and your lives and your children and your grandchildren and future generations. And the fact that we don’t get 100 percent of what we want right away is not a good reason not to vote. It means we’ve got to vote and then get some change, and then vote some more and then get some more change, and then keep on voting until we get it right…

“People ask me sometimes, they say, ‘Man, how have you been able to take these last four years, just watching all this? How do you keep your spirits up?’ And I tell him, ‘Look, for all the times these last four years that we’ve seen our worst impulses revealed, we’ve also seen what our country can be at its best.’…

“America is a good and decent place, but we’ve just seen so much noise and nonsense that sometimes it’s hard for us to remember. I’m asking you to remember what this country can be…We can’t just imagine a better future, we’ve got to fight for it. We’ve got to out-hustle the other side, we’ve got to out-work the other side, we’ve got to vote like never before and leave no doubt…Leave no doubt about what this country that we love stands for. We will not leave any doubt about who we are as a people, and the values and ideals that we embrace.”

But with that message, Obama actually has the wind at his back. Exhausted as we are by all the lies and chaos, we’ve been willing to stand in line, for up to 10 or 12 hours, to cast early votes for the country we love. At least 43 million Americans have already done so – that’s 34 percent of the total 2016 tally – and if the blue tide is sufficiently high, there’s ultimately nothing that the Kremlin’s B-list autocrat can do about it.