A great man once said that most of the world’s ills are caused by taking politics seriously.

Democrats are now learning that lesson.

In 2016, when Donald Trump mistakenly became president, the loyal opposition did not recognize him for what he was: a comedian in the style of the many Borscht Belt comedians trained in his native New York.

But when it comes down to it, Trump had no plans to fulfill his campaign promises. On issues like replacing Obamacare or building a border wall that would be paid for by Mexico, he had no plan.

He was more skilled at closing deals than executing them.

Democrats would have been wise to take advantage of that and simply let him spend his first four years as a figurehead. He did not have the votes in Congress to implement most of his policies.

Instead, they took it seriously. A key point in the Russiagate scandal came when Democrats accused him of “collusion” with Russia, in part because of a joke he told asking Vladimir Putin to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 30,000 missing emails,” Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. “I think he’ll probably be greatly rewarded by our press.”

He was clearly joking.but many members of the mainstream media took it seriously.

Then there was Ukraine. When it comes to Ukraine, the public’s ignorance was a blessing for the Bidens. Hunter Biden was involved in some shady financial dealings there. But that wouldn’t come to light until after Hunter Biden left his turned-off laptop with a Delaware computer repairman in April 2019.

It was full of information embarrassing to the Bidens. But my colleagues in the mainstream media were complicit in covering the contents of that laptop until after the 2020 elections.

“They said the laptop from hell was from Russia and I said, ‘It wasn’t from Russia.’ It was Hunter’s,’” he added. “And I never received an apology.” (Just a newspaper columnist bothered to call the former CIA agent who was in the middle of the controversy).

Trump cited that cover-up during the most recent campaign, in which Donald sounded more bitter than funny.

But that did not dent his popularity. The Donald was bulletproof, both literally and figuratively.

In the recent campaign, Donald would make one mistake or another that would end up with a lesser candidate. But the next day the polls did not change.

The most recent was that comedian’s joke about Puerto Ricans and trash at a Trump rally. Experts proclaimed that this would cost him Latino votes. In contrast, Trump’s Latino vote reached historic proportions.

Then there was the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Democrats made a big mistake by choosing a candidate who did not have to win a single primary battle to win the nomination.

If they had pressured Joe Biden to drop out of the race early on, they could have had presidential primaries open to several Democrats more skilled and accomplished than Harris.

And even with Harris on top, they could have had a much more competitive race if they had chosen someone other than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for vice president.

Arizona Sen. and New Jersey native Mark Kelly would have been a much stronger candidate, if only because that ticket would likely have won Kelly’s home state. The Harris-Walz ticket lost the state and its 11 electoral votes.

But my friends in the Democratic Party tell me that Kelly was deeply upset by public employee union leaders, who thought he had failed to show due loyalty to government workers.

Now that Trump will return to the White House with a Republican Senate and perhaps even a Republican House of Representatives, he will have the power to take whatever revenge he wants. Or so says a Republican jurist:

“I think it’s really curious how much effort the far left put into trying to criminalize Donald Trump’s actions and how that had a boomerang effect on them,” said attorney and former Assemblyman Michael Carroll of Morris County. “Many people saw what happened in New York City and recoiled in horror.”

That case was the classic example of a comedy that Democrats turned into a tragedy.

The comedy involved Stormy Daniels, the porn star who claimed to have had a flirtation with Donald.

The humorous part came when Daniels visited Trump’s penthouse for the second time.

“I remember arriving and he was watching Shark Week,” she said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “He made me sit down and watch a whole documentary about shark attacks.”

Now that’s funny! But what happened to Trump next was serious. He was convicted in Manhattan criminal court on charges of concealing money payments to Daniels 18 years earlier.

News reports say that and three other cases against Trump will be stayed while he is president.

On Wednesday morning my liberal friends were in mourning.

The big question now is how Trump will act when he returns to the White House.

All I can say to my liberal friends is: they should never have gotten him started.

But you’ll have to forgive us for laughing at the result.