Another circle of my imaginary hell would be reserved for journalists who can’t help obeying a version of the same impulse and trying to cast TrumpSlug as a tragic or romantic hero. This is at least version 2.x of the media love affair with Trump, following the portrayal of him as a master showman who is no threat to democracy because he doesn’t mean anything he says, epitomized in an odious Hollywood Reporter interview in June by Michael Wolff. As Janet Malcolm of the New Yorker observed many years ago, once journalists get hold of a narrative — Cinderella is good, and the stepsisters are bad — they never let go of it. In this case, the narrative is simply that Donald Trump is so fascinating.

In this more recent and even more offensive media narrative, Trump is a misunderstood and unloved figure, quite literally alone in his tower. (Not a beetling ruin overlooking Dartmoor, in this case, but a smoked-glass monstrosity overlooking the Harry Winston store on Fifth Avenue.) He’s like Mr. Darcy or Mr. Rochester or the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” except bright orange and with no dancing teapot. His wife is not literally locked in the attic, although events are trending in that direction.

No one excels in this genre, unsurprisingly, more than New York Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote last week about “the essential loneliness of Donald Trump.” I’m not kidding. As Brooks reluctantly admits, Trump is an “appalling” person whose campaign “sinks to new low after new low.” Yet the compassionate conservative’s response, I guess, is to experience “feelings of deep sadness and pity.”

Imagine if you had to go through a single day without sharing kind little moments with strangers and friends.

Imagine if you had to endure a single week in a hate-filled world, crowded with enemies of your own making, the object of disgust and derision.

You would be a twisted, tortured shrivel, too, and maybe you’d lash out and try to take cruel revenge on the universe. For Trump this is his whole life.

Yeah, imagine. I can hardly handle the pain. Now imagine you were a young woman who was casually assaulted by a famous rich man and carried that around in your mind and body for years afterwards, too ashamed to talk about it and not sure how to feel about it. Where is David Brooks’ deep sadness and pity for that woman? Imagine you’re some guy who runs a family contracting business in South Jersey, who felt great because you got work from a legendary billionaire who was supposedly revitalizing your state and then went bankrupt because he wouldn’t pay you. Where is David Brooks when those people are alone in the middle of the night, taking too many pills or suffering from insomnia and despair? Is he reading their tweets in a spirit of compassion and anguish?

As political analysis goes, that’s up there with “You know, Hitler really loved his dogs.” Given what followed in the week since Brooks wrote that column, he may wish he could expunge it from the Times archive. Reporter Maggie Haberman may feel similarly about the “Samson Agonistes”-style portrait of Trump she published two days earlier, in which Trump Tower is described as a “lonely fortress” where the Republican nominee lurks, “increasingly isolated and upset.” Donald Trump is upset? Oh, the humanity. As I said earlier: Jesus Christ on a bike. Was the nature of this man and his campaign not known to you people? Was the urge to narrativize — to make up a story that has a hero and a villain and the possibility of redemption, whether or not it was true — more important than Trump’s actions or words, and their effects in the real world?

There’s no need to answer that question, because in the coverage of Donald Trump over the last year it answers itself. And there’s no need to revisit the pseudo-profound op-ed Garrison Keillor wrote for the Washington Post in August, depicting Trump as a pathetic outer-borough yokel who yearns for the respect of Manhattan’s Jewish elite and wants to tell his middle American fans “one true thing”: “I love you to death and when this is over I will have nothing that I want.”

There is of course absolutely no evidence that Trump loves anyone or anything, or is capable of that kind of reflection. More to the point, the big fallacy behind all this compulsive storytelling is that because Trump has channeled an unprecedented political phenomenon he must also be an interesting person, worthy of being the hero or antihero of some compelling tale. He couldn’t possibly be a shrewd and vulgar huckster who has held up a dollar-store mirror to society’s worst impulses, or a vain and small-minded man who has hurt many people whose stories are far more worth telling than his.