It’s a silly season in U.S. politics, this being the hot August before the 2016 presidential campaign heats up in earnest.

It’s an even sillier season for the Republican Party, which fielded 17 clowns trying to outdo each other in competition for a few laughs and a bunch of boos and Bronx cheers.

And then there is Donald Trump.

Veritable oceans of ink have already been spilled dissecting the Trump phenomenon.

Unfortunately, Trump is exactly what he appears to be: a blowhard know-nothing egomaniac, a former pretty boy from Queens and a second-generation denizen of the sleazy world of New York real estate.

In denial

He’s not self-referential enough to realize what an idiotic figure he cuts, with his pompous declarations and a slew of someone else’s borrowed hair on his head.

He’s probably lapping it up and thinks an appointment with destiny awaits him on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, rather than a house of cards collapsing, probably well before then.

Trump’s line of business is to be a television personality and to sell his name to various glitzy real estate ventures.

All of a sudden he’s starting to believe that a run he started as a way to garner a bit more national publicity for this business could actually propel him to the most powerful, most visible job on earth. A kind of ultimate season of his show, “The Apprentice.”

If he were just a tiny bit smarter and less megalomaniacal, he could have had a unique chance to make history.

Expose the farce

He has one chance to emerge as a true statesman and a true national figure, as someone who can spearhead the long-overdue reforms in our nation’s entire political process.

Not by becoming president, of course. No, all he needs to do is to call a press conference in the next week or so – before the silly season comes to an end and his ratings start going down on their own – and announce that his run was a kind of hoax.

A real life Stephen Colbert 2008 presidential campaign. That he undertook it in an attempt to expose the ridiculously low level of political debate and the decline of American political culture.

Some hackers break into corporate data banks just to lay bare their vulnerabilities, not to steal money. Some concerned citizens smuggle weapons on board passenger jets to identify holes in security, but not to hijack the flight.

The Donald should declare that he purposefully took on the role of a disgusting misogynist, racist and an ignorant blowhard to hold a mirror to America. To show it how far a cartoon villain could get in today’s presidential contest.

Trump should declare that by running his campaign he wanted to alert Americans that their democracy is in real peril.

That unless they start taking their responsibility as citizens of the world’s leading nation seriously, they are going to become the laughingstock of the entire world.

Or perhaps that ship has already sailed.