I came home yesterday from an end-of-season travel soccer party to discover that my 92 year-old father had sent an email mildly reproaching me for not covering Donald Trump’s corruption as reporters like Will Bunch and David Frum have so ably done in recent days.  It touched a bit of a nerve because I have been feeling guilty about not tackling the subject.

But rather than taking on this gargantuan task, I’d rather explain why I keep procrastinating about it. It really comes down to three things.

Number one is that I’ve had a different focus because I am concerned about a more fundamental danger. Trump’s corruption may be unprecedented in scale, but he’s not running the first corrupt administration in American history. He is, however, running the first fascist administration in American history. What he’s attacking in not just integrity in government but our form of government itself, and the country’s soul.

Number two is that his corruption is so imaginative, novel and pervasive that it seems like each distinct case of it requires an herculean effort to explain, and yet will only succeed in describing an infinitesimal percentage of the problem. It’s hard for me to get motivated, for example, to write a piece on the complexities of his cryptocurrency scams when he’s quite openly doing something as basic as accepting an airplane as a gift from a foreign power.

Which gets to the third reason, which is that I actually have been reporting on his corruption, in a way, in nearly every piece I’ve written about him over the last decade. I began my coverage of Trump in 2015 by trying to educate people that he is much less a wildly successful businessman than a serial failure as a businessman who has made his way on bluster and fraud. Then I turned to the evidence that he was seeking business deals in Russia during the 2016 campaign, which explained why he was curiously solicitous of Vladimir Putin. After that, I concentrated on evidence that he sought and accepted Russian help to win the presidential election, and that he corruptly tied foreign aid to Ukraine with demands that Ukraine dishonestly malign Joe Biden’s character. Along the way, I covered many other instances, including repeated violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution during his first term in office, especially at the infamous Trump hotel in Washington DC.

In my mind, Trump and corruption are so intertwined that each new example does very little to change my impression of the man or the threat he presents to the country. At the same time, as glaringly evident as this all is in my mind, all my efforts to convince people of it have come to nothing. I’ve become convinced that writing one more piece about corruption is unlikely to change others’ opinion of the man either.

This creates a high bar for catching my interest. Does a new example present a legitimate opportunity to change this record of futility? How much effort is it going to take me to write about it in a way that isn’t just a rehash of what professional reporters with vast resources have already unearthed and provided to the public?

So, I’d say discouragement has played a part in me ignoring some of the major new corruption stories. I do not believe I wrote a single word about the gift of an airplane for example. What I actually have been writing is stuff that I am not seeing widely reported in other places, with a big focus on how what Trump has being doing is very similar to what the fascists did at the outset of their power in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

This, I believe, has more potential to make people see things in a new way and internalize the rare danger we all face. It also allows me to utilize my unique set of information and skills to provide my readers with something they simply won’t get someplace else.

You can read about Trump’s attack on elite universities in the New York Times and Washington Post, but I can help you compare it to what the National Socialists did in Germany in 1933 so you can better understand the playbook and motives of fascist movements. I’d rather do this kind of work than laboriously explain why Trump is abusing his pardon power.

In this battle, I think everyone has to use their particular skills to fight back, and while it’s good to add a voice to amplify what others are saying, it’s better to be the first person to say something that others can amplify, if that makes sense.

I hope my father will accept this explanation, but I’ll also rethink my approach. Since my conscience was already nagging me, I think he’s probably onto something.