(I’ve decided to name my political columns “One Man’s Truth,” a nod to my all-time favorite columnist,  E.B. White, who also wrote from a farm. We all have our truth, and yours is as good as mine, but right now, mine is having a moment. I want to try to capture what is essential and offer some perspective that is calm and hopefully grounding. My last column was called Make America Kind Again.)

The important political news this week is heartbreaking and comes from Minneapolis, a bastion of white progressivism trapped in yet another horrible racial tragedy.

The awful death of George Floyd brings America’s tragic and long-standing struggle with race to the forefront of a presidential campaign that was until recently all about infections,  money, and masks.

Next to the still-unfolding Pandemic and the still murky economic reckoning to come, the explosion in Minnesota will change the tone and tenor of the campaign and snap us all out of our Pandemic haze.

The coronavirus and its cast of characters – Dr. Fauci, Andrew Cuomo – is receding.  Maybe it will return; perhaps it won’t.

Trump won the great battle to Re-Open America. People are sick of being locked down, and as the virus moves to attack mostly poor and older adults, they are not willing to sacrifice much more to stop it.

But rather than focus on this emerging victory, Trump has once again mired himself in so many divisive and controversial and peripheral issues that his prospects suddenly look worse than ever.

No one ever thought being shameless was such a potent political strategy.

Once again, he chose to blow his slow gain in popularity by stupidly threatening to kill off Twitter, his lifeline to the “Left Behind,” and by making an offensive and racially charged threat to shoot looters, a threat that could make the rioting even more violent than it is.

When the looting starts, the shooting begins. It’s a whole new way to be president. I will be honest about it, I will miss him when he is gone.

Out in the Rose Garden, Trump discovered a few minutes of humility and took another whack at empathy, he did his daily rain dance, his rope-a-dope. Well, he didn’t know where the quote came from or what it implied, he just heard it somewhere.

Floyd’s death was inexcusable, unforgivable, an awful thing, he said. The looters were dishonoring the memory of a great man. If he hadn’t died in that awful way, you got the feeling Trump would have asked him to the White House for dinner.

Trump seems to be toying with this empathy thing, he gave it a shot – he called Floyd’s family, he said, they are “terrific people.”

But he just can’t pull it off. He’s about as empathetic as a window mannequin in a department store window.

But this time, he couldn’t mask the gaffe, it was right up there with the bleach.

Trump just made all of black America into an army on the march for Joe Biden. Biden called George’s family too.

The killing of George Floyd and the shocking video and the subsequent riots created a significant opportunity for the two candidates to begin to let crisis weary citizens get to know them.

If Biden is just starting to present himself to voters, Trump is wearing them out. He is running out of time to change his public persona, the election will be here in a blink.

Once again, Trump blew an opportunity to rise above himself and offer concern and healing.

Once again, he declined the chance to be positive and expand his following and managed to be crude and divisive at the most sensitive time.

His comments were dangerous and disturbing, especially in the middle of another tragedy.

Biden was all over this story, and in a smart way. He is coming out of his chrysalis.

He presented himself as the healer and conciliator, the soother, and the warrior for social justice.

He seemed genuinely moved by the shooting.

Maybe he learned this from Barack Obama; nobody did grieving and empathy better.

Biden is beginning to make the very charged argument that Trump is killing people – with his irresponsible medical advice,  his handling of the Pandemic, his jeering at masks, his eagerness to shoot looters,  and his winks at white supremacists and vigilantes.

There is also his insistence on cramming tens of thousands of people into a stadium in North Carolina to  honor him in the midst of a pandemic. He wants a big crowd, his aides say, and if it kills some of them to be there, well, at least they didn’t die as sissies.

Lots of Trump’s shocking lurches into offense and outrage are smart; the one about Minneapolis is not. There are only so many angry old white men in America; they are very much the past,  not the future, or even the present.

Trump is desperate to keep African Americans and other minorities from voting too quickly, as in mail ballots.

So why enrage them by threatening to kill their children? They will find a way to vote.

People’s hearts went out to Floyd and his family, not to Target. That video was a gut punch, the kind that sticks. Issues relating to African-Americans and the police are not going away.

They require the most sensitive handling. Our president is turning out to be as sensitive as a buffalo in a tea parlor.

On TV, Biden’s empathy was genuine; it seems to be natural to him. Still, he also seemed to grasp the political opportunity: an enraged and aroused African- American electorate has only one place to go in this election year. It ain’t to the  Republican Party.

Trump’s threat to send troops into Minneapolis to shoot young  African-Americans (he was channeling a notoriously racist Miami Police Chief from decades ago), some of whom were looting stores, cannot possibly help him.

The people who want to shoot looters already love Trump.

The middle of the road fence-sitters and the elderly and young people and moderates and women in the suburbs are moving steadily away from him. They seem to want a kinder America again.

You might think he would want to soften his act just a little bit right now. But it only gets uglier and angrier by the day. He was nasty at the podium, nasty in the Rose  Garden, nasty on Twitter.

Nothing wears people down more than nasty, day in and day out. Ronald Reagan understood that, when a reporter asked him an ugly question, he would smile and wave and keep walking.

Nobody even heard the question.

People never saw him frown. No matter what was happening, it was always morning in America.

By and large, people aren’t looking to hang out every day for years with a nasty old man.

This evil ranting will not help; most people would like to have their normal lives back – on many levels.

Trump does not know how to be normal. He is Lord Chaos, mired in the battles of a different time. Put Obama in jail, investigate Biden, fire the Inspector Generals.

But 100,000 people have died from the coronavirus. Well, Joe Scarborough is a murderer and I need to play some golf. Without a mask. Take that, you wussies of the radical left, real men don’t wear masks or show any kind of weakness.

Captain America, on the other hand, is the prince of normal. He breathes it. He wears a mask. He even remembers to talk about the veterans on Memorial Day.

So there it is, the scene is set for the election, everybody with an obvious choice to make, few gray or blurry lines. This is clearly what Trump thinks people want.

I think the reality is just the opposite.

Trump has provoked a great political awakening in America, especially among women and the young and minorities and suburbanites, and perhaps, even the elderly.

For the first time in years, Democrats hate an opponent more than they hate each other. That is historic in itself, and Donald Trump did it.

That’s why Biden is threatening Trump is almost every state in the country without making a single campaign appearance for months.

More and more, I’m starting to think that all Biden has to do is nothing (or maybe he needs to dance with Stacy Abrams, with whom he appeared at a church service in Selma, Alabama in April. That would be a pretty sensational choice right about now.)

Amid the whirlwind, an eerie calm.

A President who campaigns like a tornado that never stops knocking things down, and a challenger who campaigns like Mr. Rogers sitting in his sweater, unfailingly friendly, calm,  making sure all the kids feel safe and loved.

The whole western world is praying for the man in the sweater, listening quietly in the basement to his record player.

I wish Biden were younger and more exciting, but I have to confess he is growing on me. He seems comfortable with himself, unlike his opponent. He’s not afraid to make a mistake or to take a hit in silence.

I have little sympathy for Twitter, which has poked the dragon big-time, and which dug itself one of the deepest holes in the history of media. Like the monster told Dr. Frankenstein, you made me, you are responsible for me.

In my dreams, Twitter and Facebook eat Google and then one another. They are all much too big, much too powerful, much too out of control.

Aside from looking things up online, the world would probably be a better place if they were all broken up. Amazon might just end up buying all of them.

I would not want to be Twitter trying to explain why Trump’s mad rantings online are now suddenly unacceptable.

How do you suddenly care about truth and decency when you have undermined and diminished both for years?

Every day, just before the evening news, Trump drops another bomb, and the media rushes to bite. Obama, a criminal, so is Joe Biden and his son, worse than Hilary. Lock them up.

I think of many of my readers as suffering through their own cultural London, so many bombs raining down on them it is both numbing and frightening. But this isn’t the apocalypse; it just feels like it sometimes.

He and Joe Biden share a remarkable trait – shit just slides right off of them. Trump’s followers will always seem him as a brave and unappreciated hero and victim, voters will never buy Biden as a crook who ought to get locked up.

Biden is beginning to respond to Trump daily now, you may have noticed – he criticized him sharply for his provocative tweets about Minneapolis – and the media, ever eager for a wrestling match, is beginning to pay a lot of attention to him.

Biden also has the gift of being woefully underestimated, often seen as a doddering old man who can’t utter a single comprehensible sentence. When he called Trump a “fool’ on Memorial Day for not wearing a mask, cheers went up all across the blogosphere, he suddenly was cheered like he was JFK.

The Democratic Party finally has a national leader to counter Trump every day. Nancy Pelosi looks very tired, holding down that fort by herself. Don’t underestimate old folks, they can be wily and stubborn, and people tend to sympathize with them.

The media love nothing more than a fight; now, they have their sporting event. Trump can be challenged directly, every day, by an opponent with some microphones around him.

The enemy for Trump is the same – hubris.

Since he believes he is smarter than everyone else and listens to no one, he has begun to make the same mistake again and again – from those rambling and demented briefings at the White House to those angry and disjointed briefings in the Rose Garden, to his increasingly over-the-top tweets.

Day after day, he closes doors, slams them in voter’s faces; he keeps chipping away at his dwindling chances to gain support.

As the country enters the summer, people are paying more and more attention to the campaign. What they are getting is the 2016 campaign, somehow out of sync now and no longer exciting, just angry.

It’s not 2016,  Biden is a lot more popular than Hilary Clinton and has a much more unified party behind him. And let’s be honest, he seems a lot nicer than Hilary.

Trump feels out of control to me, he’s lost his joyously erratic mojo.

Right now, Biden is reading the mood of the country much more skillfully than President Trump, who seems to have only one speed: red hot crazy, offensive and divisive.

I’m not sure that even his most rabid followers can stand four more years of this.

This is a campaign for the brave and the grounded, but following it will be like living right underneath an elevated subway line.

I’m glad my columns have a name.