Wednesday was a sad day for America.

We watched the mob violence and lawlessness in Washington with a tear in our eye.

We saw images of the Capitol stormed by hundreds of yahoos who fought with police, broke windows and forced the evacuation of a session of the U.S. Congress. At least four died in the chaos.

Wednesday was also a very sad day for conservatives, the Republican Party and tens of millions of American citizens who voted to reelect President Trump for all the right reasons.

But it was a really terrible day for Donald Trump.

The shocking events in Washington on Wednesday — which he provoked with his stubborn insistence he had been robbed by the systemic cheating of Democrats — have soiled his legacy forever.

And please, before I continue, I don’t want you Trump supporters out there to tweet at me with any of that “What about the violent BLM and Antifa riots in our cities all summer?” crap.

Those destructive and deadly riots by leftists were wrong and so was Wednesday’s riot by Trump people in D.C.

It’s not brain surgery.

Riots, mob violence and destroying private property is never right, even though many Democrats and the hypocritical liberal media think they’re justified if they’re done in the name of “progressive causes” or benefit them politically.

Trump could have prevented Wednesday’s national embarrassment and saved Republicans from disaster, but his ego and his narcissism got the better of him.

Like Hillary Clinton, who is still blaming her embarrassing defeat in 2016 on the Russians, Trump has proved for nine weeks that he doesn’t know how to lose.

He could have taken the high road and left office with a phenomenal legacy — and a solid conservative one.

Despite the way the dishonest liberal media ignored or dismissed his record of accomplishments for four years, he could have been remembered by history for a lot of good things.

For getting the COVID-19 vaccine out so quickly.

For creating a booming economy, cutting taxes, raising workers’ wages and turning America into an energy superpower.

Or how about for important things like keeping America out of any new foreign wars, shrinking our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and greatly increasing the country’s overall military strength?

But after Wednesday no one cares much about all those great successes and many others he never tired of boasting about.

It a shame. It could have been much different for the president.

He’s still a hero to millions of Flyover Americans and still a major political player. But the country he wanted to make great again is going to pay the ultimate price for his character flaws.

With the federal government virtually turned into a one-party socialist state, the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi troika will quickly flush away or turn around all the good things Trump did.

Unfortunately, it will be years before conservatives and the Republican Party can recover from the damage Trump has wrought just since Nov. 3.

We conservatives have been down and out before. The year 1976 comes to mind. But we bounced back with the right leadership and we can do it this time, too.

We have to regroup. We need to look forward, to find young new leaders to take us into the political future Trump has made for us.

Maybe now is a good time to go back and listen to some of my father’s great speeches, or his radio addresses from the late 1970s, and remember what he meant when he said he envisioned America as “a shining city on the hill.”

In the meantime, I ask all conservatives and Trump supporters — all 74,222,958 of you — to please stop thinking of Donald Trump as the equal of Ronald Reagan.

There is nothing my father and Donald Trump had in common and there never will be.

Ronald Reagan’s legacy was tearing down the Berlin Wall. Donald Trump’s legacy is going to be tearing down the Capitol. So sad.

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan