While reading an opinion-piece lament by David Brooks on the “sad, lonely life” of Donald Trump — in which the writer offers his armchair diagnosis of Trump as suffering from a psychological disorder — I suddenly wondered what the Bronxville Rotary Club must be thinking these days.

Back in January 1999, I was writing about New York and national theatre events for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while teaching at NYU and Stony Brook University. I had been invited to address a luncheon meeting of that suburban New York branch of the international civic group. My topic was “Theatre in the Information Age” and I hoped to inspire middle-age and elderly members of the group to become more engaged with the lively arts, especially theatre, appealing to their business sensibilities to advocate for the arts not only as a community-building asset but as an economic engine for the good of all.

I had never been to a Rotary meeting before but had heard that there was the singing of an essentially tuneless, rambling song of welcome followed by the “passing of a hat” into which members were to place a dollar and offer a thought. This was only a few weeks after President Clinton had been impeached and was a few weeks before he would be acquitted by the Senate. A couple of days before I was to appear at the luncheon , Frank Rich declared in the New York Times that he saw “scant downside . . . to a protracted trial, with tons of witnesses, that drags on until the next election.” A lengthy trial did not unfold, though the Clinton family might have thought (and might still think) otherwise. In returning to Rich’s opinion piece, I was especially struck by one assertion:

No one is forcing anyone to watch a trial, and anyone who fears that further salacious revelations might soil the nation at this point must have spent the past year locked up in Colonial Williamsburg.

In light of the information that continues to tumble out of the 2016 election cycle, does Rich still feel as though there are no revelations left that might “soil” us? At this point, we must worry how much lower we might tumble. John Oliver, of Last Week Tonight, may have put it best in his opening monologue Sunday night: “We have sunk so low, we are breaking through the earth’s crust, where drowning in hot magma will come as sweet relief.” Who among us does not feel the need for a shower after hearing the latest news about this election?

At the mid-impeachment Rotary meeting in 1999, I was surprised when the hat — or whatever receptacle was used — was passed and participant after participant gave a dollar while saying, “beat Hillary.” At the time, the Clintons did not even have a home in New York, but Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had announced his retirement a couple of months earlier and New York politicians were reportedly urging Ms. Clinton to run for his seat. That she ran for the office and won is well known, of course, as we stand on the brink of her potential election to the presidency. But it was amazing to see how obsessed were these wealthy Republicans with merely the idea that Hillary Clinton might run for the U.S. Senate from New York. All those dollar bills and wishful thinking gone for nought.

A charming, boyish man in his fifties, who looked vaguely familiar, had started the thought-sharing with the first “beat Hillary” accompanied by a wide, almost impish grin. After I was introduced to him, I knew where I had seen Dwight Chapin before. He was a former special assistant to Richard Nixon who had been convicted in the fallout from the Watergate scandal. By the time we met in 1999, he was a successful businessman, whose Nixonian bona fides certainly never hurt his pursuit of success.

For all of the apparent good humor at that Rotary luncheon, it seemed extremely odd that these men of power and privilege, who lived in one of the wealthiest enclaves in America, were besotted with beating a woman who was daily humiliated in the public prints. What must those men be thinking today? That Donald Trump is the last, best hope for the Republican Party?

As we celebrate International Day of the Girl, let us not ponder the “sad, lonely” existence of Donald Trump. Think about how far we have come and how far we must yet go. Bring the change.