(Note. Whenever I try to explain that Donald Trump is not stupid and is very easy to underestimate, and needs to be understood rather than simply reviled,  people message me to say I am too kind to him, my descriptions too gentle.  On the other side, people accuse me of being a socialist conspirator plotting against our leader.  Before 2016, I had never once been accused of bias in my years of political writing. Now, I am accused of bias every time I write on every side. I don’t much care what other people think.  I will persevere.)

For people trying to fathom the remarkable, so far indestructible endurance of President Trump, this is the perfect time to consider it and understand it.

Donald  Trump has an almost psychic ability to gauge the moods and passions of his followers, and thus to motivate them to remain loyal to him. This has kept him on the edge of victory, he never falls back, he never quite gets ahead.

He alone somehow grasps the reality, anger, and misery of rural America and speaks to it. He surprises and confounds his opponents again and again, and seems to have a Superhero shield as impenetrable as Captain America’s.

He has just made what we political reporters used to a call a “big pivot,” a bold and risky turn in a strategy that will either win him re-election or take it away from him. It is also a life-and-death pivot. People will almost surely die because of it.

His opponents seem, as always baffled and off-balance.

President Trump is nothing if not a bold gambler and risk-taker; all of his opponents look meek and out of touch in comparison. By being shameless, he has also made himself impervious to shame.

Lying and cruelty are now virtues.

While New York Governor Andrew Cuomo continues to be the moral and alternative national voice of restraint, humanity, science, and caution.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, his corona doppelganger,  has been taken out of the equation.

Governor Cuomo is the only one standing with any real media power on the other side.

Trump has once again done and said what everyone else thought impossible, indefensible, and irresponsible.

He has pivoted away from his failed role as National Coronavirus King and, on a dime and without blinking, recast himself of the leader of the somewhat fantastical movement to instantly return to normal and save the economy, just in time for the November election.

Trump is one of the great chameleons of modern politics. He changes his color in a flash and hides in a fog of outrage, tweets, frustration, and confusion.

This may be the most significant pivot of a lifetime of surprising and improbably pivots.

Still, critics would do well to take some time out from trashing him and recall that every other one of his pivots in life – four bankruptcies, his famous tape, his disastrous suggestion that we drink bleach – have worked out well for him.

I can only imagine what would happen if I suggested here on the blog that people ought to drink bleach to cure the coronavirus.

Mr. Trump is very good at pivoting, there is a supernatural part of him that simply deflects disaster, it just slides right off of him. Like some battered boxing champion, when you think he is done, he gets up off the mat and starts swinging. He moves so quickly and loudly that he is never the same thing for more than a day or two, in the military that is called a moving target.

The President is always moving.

I don’t write this to endorse him or glorify him, but people who lose sleep over this man do need to understand how he works and why he succeeds, at least up to now.

Of all the politicians I’ve seen, Andrew Cuomo is the only one who has figured out that the way to undermine and even best him is to simply be better than him, calmer, consistent, more humane, and more moral.

Nothing else has worked.

One of Trump’s stumbles is to sometimes make his opponents look good. He has made Cuomo look like Mahatma  Gandhi.

To assume that Joe Biden can beat President Trump just because he’s a decent guy is just more folly.

For a preview of the coming campaign, just watch how  Trump retains the light and sparks the headlines day after day while Biden sits in his basement listening to his “record player.” Sadly, decency doesn’t seem to matter anymore, nor does truth.

It takes a Pandemic to get anyone’s attention, and Trump sucks up all the oxygen in the room, except for Dr. Fauci, who is no longer even in the room.

For the media, another disastrously poor performance for such a smug and closeted institution. Once again, rural America is in turmoil and uproar, once again very few reporters have been sent out to take a look, or see it coming.

This ought to feel familiar.

Trump intuitively sensed what the national media, still gathered in pens in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles didn’t grasp.

In Trump’s country, the virus has most often been much less severe and damaging than anticipated, leaving the medical and political gurus once again looking hysterical and insensitive.

We all live in our separate reality, in the Northeast where I live, there is an intense preoccupation with the virus, the suffering, the masks, and sanitizers. But I also live in the country, and there is a different reality: nothing much is happening.

When it comes to the coronavirus, all counties are not equal.

About half the country doesn’t know anyone who has the virus and doesn’t understand why they can’t open their businesses and work.

The other half is intensely engaged in one of the great humanitarian crises of modern times and has seen their communities devastated by it, their hospitals and morgues overflowing with the lonely and isolated dead, their parents, and grandparents dead.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger or more disturbing schism than that.

In New York City, almost everyone knows someone who was sick, who died, or who risked their lives to keep on working. It’s a different dynamic, a different narrative.

The President, as he does, has chosen a different narrative, and banished the other from his consciousness.

President Trump is not old school nice like Joe Biden.

He is happy to be King Asshole for much of the country, and a hero to those he needs to win re-election. He is not the least bit interested in working across the aisle or keeping bi-partisanship alive, or in what almost anyone reading this thinks.

I don’t see the old school as having found a way to beat him, and time is running out. Some people are counting on the Pandemic to do it for them, that’s a tough bet.

People in rural America know what it is like to lose their jobs and economies, especially when so many of them don’t know anyone who is sick. They are angry and helpless at losing their livelihoods and family security because people mostly in cities far away are experiencing an awful Pandemic.

“They’re doing it to us again,” one farmer told me, “just like last time. All the jobs are gone again; all our businesses and farms are dying again. They are not the only ones sitting up and crying at night.”

You can say they are selfish and reckless, but perhaps not if women are being beaten and threatened in droves,  or unemployed workers are once again struggling to find food for their children,  or their hopeless kids are drinking and drugging themselves to death in droves again.

Every business they frequent is closed again, many for good. I remind myself that I need to be in those shoes before I point too many fingers.

It’s not for me to say which policy is right and which one is wrong – I do trust doctors – but it is clear that Trump has found himself a brilliant place to hide and recover: in the lives and rage of another group our country has left behind for years.

Demographically, just about every racial or social metric in our country with the exception of Native-Americans was doing better, living longer, making more money, and was healthier than rural people.

To some people, Trump’s decision to turn away from the Pandemic and push his doctors out of the White House and off of television seems callous, driven entirely by corporate greed and personal ambition.

That’s one way of looking at it.

I don’t know what it inside of his grotesquely coiffed head, but I think it is essential to understand him and what makes him so popular to many, and such a threat to many others.

Hatred of Trump obscures people’s ability to see him clearly and makes it much more difficult to challenge.

He has created a bond with his followers, which is one of the great success stories in the history of American politics.

Trump-hating is a cold and lonely faith if that’s all there is. Calling him names has been a colossal failure.

People e-mail me all day long telling me what a lying, creepy monster he is, but I’m not sure where this is getting them or us.

The Cuomo idea is the only one I’ve seen worth studying because he is consistently more than twice as popular as the President, in rural as well as urban areas. And he is not pandering to the angry rifle-toting mobs whining about their constitutional rights to make other people sick.

Trump is saying true to himself, and one of Trump’s greatest weakness is that he is never true to himself, no one around him can begin to explain who or what he is beneath all that hair and tanning and tailoring.

Three weeks ago, he seemed to be disintegrating, standing in front of that podium and making a complete fool of himself. He could not have looked weaker or more inhumane and incompetent.

In just those few days, he has once again shifted the narrative in his favor. In ways that most people don’t understand, he has a feel for what is really important to his followers, what they want, how selfish and wounded they sometimes seem to be.

While those of us who live in urban, media-centric cities with high counts of coronavirus infections are transfixed and obsessed by the virus, vast swaths of the country have no sense of it, and are not experiencing the worst of it.

So here we have the most significant social and medical catastrophe of the century, and our elected leader has just chosen to walk away from it, and get on with the economy, which everyone knows is his political strength. Would anyone else dare to do that?

To many of Trump’s supporters and many who are not his supporters, the argument he is making is that our economy should not be obliterated, no matter how many thousands of people may get sick or die.

And make no mistake about it: they don’t care how many old and poor people die.

The idea that the poor and the sick and the elderly – our most vulnerable – are being sacrificed is anathema to many people, just and inevitable to others. So many people now see his cruel and sometimes hateful immigration policies as pure genius.

In every Pandemic in human history, people turn on immigrants and try to shut them out.

As the children of refugees, this breaks my heart. But it lifts the spirits of almost everyone around me.

Trump, raging and spewing in his White House isolation, caught this shift when most of the smartypants in their broadcast studios did not.

For weeks, he was working desperately to persuade us that his management of the virus was a magnificent success. In just a few days, he abandoned that failing proposition and is not working hard to present himself as the best manager of the economy.

It’s a much better and smarter fit politically.

So he ignored the experts and pollsters, threw caution to the wind, and took his shot.

He bet the virus would get better, not worse, he pushed the gloomy, scolding doctors out of the limelight, and he said to the angry and disaffected and yes, once again ignored:  go back to work and save our economy and your savings before it’s too late.

He said every single thing they want to hear.

Get your kids back in school, open up the bars and businesses and restaurants, don’t let any politician take your life and livelihood away from you when you can’t see any real danger to you or our family, and lockdowns seem to make no sense.

They are just trying to screw you again, he says again and again. And me, too.

The somewhat chilling undercurrent to this – one even President Trump and his friends on Fox News won’t say out loud is this: old people and poor people get sick and die, this is what they do. The rest of us, and all that makes us safe and secure, should not be sacrificed for them.

This Pandemic is unpredictable and is potentially much more powerful than Trump. Sometimes, it seems to be playing with us, changing gears, surprising us, frightening us. I sometimes get this spine-tingling feeling that the coronavirus has a consciousness and is picking its targets carefully.

If it wants to get into the White House, it gets into the White House.

If the doctors and scientists are right, then Trump has finally made a fatal mistake, one he cannot slip out of or distract us from. If they are wrong, we will learn one more time of the great danger from underestimating him.

I was taught to respect doctors and scientists. I’m still betting on the Pandemic to torture and surprise us for some time and also lead us to a better place.

I always fashioned myself as a bold analyst, and I tend to admire bold people. I am not afraid to be wrong.

My job is not to predict the future, but to explain the present, the core ethos of the true journalist. I hope I’m going that.

A pox on the left and the right. Labels kill the mind.