By Joe Posnanski

Tribune News Service

Ever since my book, “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini,” came out, people have asked if I have tried any impossible escapes of my own. I’m going to try one here. I’m going to try and write about President Donald Trump without invoking politics. Wish me luck.

It is stunning how many people have read the book — a story about the great escape artist and how he still impacts the world — and immediately thought of Trump.

He is not referenced in the book. But he is there, because the similarities between Houdini and Trump are, pardon the word, inescapable.

Houdini was the greatest showman of his time or, perhaps, any time. He was a master at using the media to promote himself.

He was a prolific mythmaker or liar, if you prefer. Nothing about Houdini was at it seemed. He relished every challenge that came his way —including allowing the punch to the stomach that led to his death.

He ruthlessly attacked his enemies and his perceived enemies. He would sometimes go to shows of his imitators while dressed as an old man. He would then take the stage, lock up the imposters in unbreakable handcuffs, tear off his costume and shout, “I am Houdini!”

Houdini once sued a German newspaper and police officer who charged him with perpetrating a fraud on German audiences. He won in court and told the story repeatedly for the rest of his life.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Understand, Houdini began as a struggling and conventional magician —in 1898, he put up all of his secrets for sale — when he made an astonishing discovery: People, everywhere, love the seemingly impossible escape.

And so he began escaping from handcuffs and chains and jails and straitjackets and milk cans and water torture cells and boxes and bags and anything else — “Nothing on earth can hold Houdini a prisoner,” he insisted. And in that time long before radio, much less Instagram, he went viral again and again.

And our fascination with escape goes on, it is timeless. This is why Houdini is constantly referenced today. Every time a quarterback escapes a sack, a dog escapes a yard, a friend escapes paying the bill or an inmate escapes a jail cell, they are the next Houdini.

Trump has been called Houdini many times in his life by his biggest fans and his fiercest critics. It’s undeniable: He’s the escape artist of our time.

He repeatedly escapes from situations that would have stopped even the savviest of politicians and business leaders. And he does it much in the same way that Houdini did: With audacity and shamelessness and limitless refusal to accept defeat and a supernatural belief in his own powers.

When Trump, as reports say, added a Sharpie mark to a weather map to prove that Alabama was indeed in the line of a hurricane, it was like Houdini had come back to life. That’s exactly what he would have done.

One of my favorite stories in the book is about the time a man named William Hope Hodgson intended to defeat Houdini. He challenged Houdini to escape from his personal handcuffs and Hodgson proceeded to put multiple handcuffs and chains around Houdini until, as one reporter said, he looked like “a trussed turkey.”

Houdini complained repeatedly that this wasn’t a fair fight, that Hodgson had almost broken his arm, that he had lost all feeling in his limbs and asked to have the chains removed for a moment.

“This is a contest, not a love match,” Hodgson shouted as the crowd booed.

Hodgson was sure he had Houdini beaten. There were no tricks left, no misdirections to pull, no secrets to hide. Houdini was entirely up and he couldn’t get out and that was that.

Only Houdini got out. And then he stood before the audience, his arms were bloodied and his face was white from exhaustion, and in his own words, “I suffered the tortures of hell. I sweat blood!” But he escaped because he always escaped and that isn’t just Houdini’s story.

Joe Posnanski is a bestselling author and a longtime journalist who currently is senior writer for “The Atlantic Magazine.”