(Why people’s greatest fears about Donald Trump are his fatal flaws, and why hate and fear obscure truth and understanding, and make him stronger. This man will never invade your home, town, or country. Last week, a bunch of women politicians, most of them black, and with far less power, beat the crap out of him at every turn.)

I’ve been paying close attention to Mr. Trump for some time now, especially in the past few months, when I realized that I wanted – okay, needed –  to write about him and the political turmoil in our country.

That was before the racial turmoil.

This deep worry is reaching a boiling point, and at the worst possible time for a leader that cannot find a way to care for anyone but himself.

But most of these fears are simply not warranted, grounded in anxiety more than reality.

For weeks now, strong women all over the country – mayors and governors – have been beating the crap out of Donald Trump, defying and stopping him at every dumb and foolish turn.

And they are getting away with it.

It has left Donald Trump bobbing, weaving,  hiding, and hanging by his fingernails.

This is not a man who wants to take over your life; this is a man who only wants you to adore and praise him. It’s all you have to do to win his approval and deflect his attention. He cannot bear to be criticized.

The Freudian analysts will have to figure out why, but we see it all the time.

The Hitler analogies and fears of a military coup show the perils of hysteria and panic. They are not close to being true. What you hate and fear about him the most is precisely what is undoing him, right out in the open, every day.

It has been a productive and revelatory time for me. I’ve watched as Trump obsessions –  fear fueled by hatred and outrage – have blinded journalists, politicians, and many good people to an increasingly apparent, even glaring,  and very different, truth.

The things that worry people the most about Donald Trump – his hatred of constitutional restrictions, his hatred of free speech, his contempt for the poor and the immigrants, his naked racism, his refusal to take responsibility, comparisons to Hitler,  his disturbing lack of empathy, and most recently, fears that he is planning to use the military to take power if his own is rejected – have triggered waves of worry.

But some of the most serious of those fears are groundless. If there ever was a time for cool heads and perspective, this is it. Trump is bad enough without comparing him to Hitler or preparing sandbags for his invasion.

Everyone has the right to see the world the way they want; I am no great pundit and have no crystal ball. What I see is a man failing at every single turn in every single way, blowing one opportunity after another to draw the support he desperately needs to survive.

There is no rhyme or coherence or reason to what he does, or where he is going. Politically, he’s like a terrified carriage horse with no driver, running wildly from one place to another, through crowded streets filled with obstacles.

This is a frightened and cowardly man who is absolutely nothing like Adolf Hitler and has neither the strength or stomach or skill to invade his own city, let alone his own country.

He has no definable ideology, no focus, or sustained will power; he is driven not by conviction but by obsession only for how he looks, not for how he does or even what he does.

He’s drunk on grievance and resentment – addicted to both – he takes no other drink.

Absolute power for Donald  Trump is not about tanks, it’s about never being criticized. He has no will or attention span for taking control of my life or village, he is trapped in a broken kind of bubble, a chrysalis where there is nothing but praise and adoration, and never a whiff of criticism or defiance.

He does not relate to the real world, only his distorted corner of it.

Criticism and defiance does him in at every turn.  Every turn.

A leftie actress or football player’s tweet is just as important to him as a U.S. Senator’s. There is no difference to him, they are all equal targets for his time and energy.

This often turns my stomach, it rarely frightens me.

He now sees more challenges and criticism than he ever imagined and is psychologically unfit to handle. He can’t take it.

I know few people reading this will pity him, but I do pity him.  I’d rather be human than self-righteous. How awful to live inside of that head.

This is not someone for me to fear, as much as I dislike the damage he has caused.

The more earnestly and literally he is taken, the better he does.

The more he is understood, the more distinctly he emerges a fragile, broken, and terrified person with no guard rails, empathy, common sense,  or tools to lead.

Because he can’t be corrected, he is surrounded by sycophants who can’t dissuade him from the most egregious mistakes. He can’t work with strong and healthy adult people. And, fatally for him, he is not as smart as he thinks he is.

And I see now that women will ultimately do him in, especially at the ballot box, but also in his daily life and decisions. They already are. It seems they have a lot more conviction than many men in public life.

In the past two weeks, the female governor of Michigan has defied and ridiculed him, the black female mayors of Atlanta has eloquently stripped him of his paper-thin mask, and the black female mayor of Washington, D.C. has humiliated him.

Muriel Bowser almost singlehandedly beat back his efforts to call in the Army to take over the policing of her city after protests there. The President wasn’t trying to conquer the city, he was only trying to prove that he was not “scared,’ as the mayor suggested he was.

That’s why he tried to call out the army.

He called the mayor a bunch of names and then ran for the hills, blaming underlings for his mistake.

He has struggled to depict each of these women as weak Democrats out to get him, but that has failed. What he has done is to give them much more credibility than he has.

And inspired them to show their strength.

It Mayor Bowser’s her tweet pointing out his cowardice in the bunker, reported the Washington Post, that triggered the calling in of the Army and the staggeringly stupid march across Lafayette Square with his daughter’s bible, while surrounded by his army,  a move that will inevitably live in political infamy.

Democratic leaders are not supposed to hide behind the people with their armies.

The worst thing for Donald Trump, it turned out, was not that protesters were threatening to destroy the capital city, but that he was accused of being weak. It isn’t what he does that he cares about. It’s only how he seems.

After Mayor Bowser had city crews paint that giant yellow “Black Lives Matter,” sign on the street, and called Trump out for the frightened man he was, hiding in his bunker, almost all of the police and the soldiers disappeared with 24 hours.

He had the chance for his great confrontation with the forces of the left. He blinked.

Muriel Bowser, not Donald Trump, won the Battle of Washington in 2020. The reporters were still chasing after the President, begging and crawling for sound bites.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said on CNN that he was “disgusting” for invoking George Lloyd when the job numbers came out,  and Trump couldn’t resist,  lost his lunch, his perspective, and more female voters.

There is nothing this politician needs more than women voting for him in 2020; he manages to alienate more and more of them every single day. Is this the hallmark of the dangerous man? Now, people have begun to laugh and roll their eyes, not quiver.

I don’t know what these female politicians are having for breakfast, but they ought to give the recipe to the Washington Press Corps and the Republicans in the U.S. Senate.

During all of those debates in 2016, no man could touch him or put a dent in him. Bowser would have eaten him for lunch. She did this week.

Trump is a destructive man, but to me, he has never risen to the level of evil.

Every day you can watch him come undone by the most trivial things. One just has to see him as small nor large. Think of the wicked witch of the East and the words she spoke when Dorothy threw water on her: “I’m Melting!’

America is not a Banana Republic or a devastated Middle Eastern desert country.

Its civil structures are healthy and intact. Its military was raised on the notion of protecting, not crushing, the citizenry.

The use of the military to force states to do his bidding would be an unimaginable bloodbath and eruption, far worse than any havoc he has so far caused.

He would need a lot more of Muriel Bowser’s Wheaties.

Do you want to defeat Donald Trump? Here’s what the record shows.  Get a strong and articulate black or white female politician to tweet about him every day; you will see the top of his head spin right out of its socket and off into space.

These mayors know how to be tough and strong, and Donald Trump is terrified of strong women who challenge him.  They are fearless, he is terrified of strong women.

I have never seen any human being unravel as quickly and as thoughtless as he does, especially one in whom so many people have invested so much faith and hope.

The corporate media is a co-conspirator in this, I’m sad to say. You have here a narcissist who takes nothing he says seriously with a press corps that takes every word he says seriously.

For a democracy, that is toxic.

I can’t blame Trump on the media, but I can sure be shocked at them for profiting so greedily and irresponsibly on people’s fear of him and building it up every single day.

People forget that these “news” organizations are all corporate now, they make a lot of money – billions of dollars – off of our fear and his dysfunction.

Does any rational person really think the very savvy commentators on Fox News  – the other hobgoblin of our politics – don’t see Trump in reality? Every one of them is smarter than I am, and every one of them is smarter than he is, and sees him just as I see him.

Fox News’ averages viewer is white and more than 65 years old. The company made more than a billion dollars supporting the President.

They all came from the same places I did – working families and starter media jobs. They all see the same thing I see.

Like the President himself, these are not people who act out of faith or ideology; they are just getting famous and making money.

This week offered us a perfect example of why he cannot and will not do hardly any of the things that make people fear him the most.

Here was another potentially great triumph for him – an economy that appears to be recovering, a big surprise – and all he could do was deeply offend almost every black or feeling person in America  – another constituency he is desperate to attract -by dragging George Floyd’s name into his self back-patting.

When the limelight is on him, he has only one gear – whine, complain, and divide. There is simply no other, even when he gets to read off of a teleprompter. It has never changed, it is not going to change.

And once more, sabotaging himself pointlessly and without reason.

The growing number of Hitler comparisons and invocations are also worth challenging and rejecting. They frighten people, and that is a waste of energy and focus. It distorts any rational understanding of this President.

Hitler was nothing like Trump.

Trump reaffirms Hannah Arendt’s famous observation about evil. One can do evil without being evil. The women thwarting Trump would not have put a dent in a person like Hitler.

Hitler was a lot smarter than Donald Trump, for one thing, and a lot more ideologically driven. As horrible as he was, he believed everything he did and said, he didn’t waffle and wabble and whine when someone challenged or criticized him.

He didn’t tweet insults at people.

He just killed them.

And he took full responsibility for everything he did. This was what made him so powerful and makes Trump so weak.

Hitler had a Satanic mission, and he carried it out to the bitter end with astonishing efficiency and conviction. His vision went far beyond praise and adoration.

Trump is neither efficient nor possessed of any strong opinions of his own, they all seem to come from others outside of him, and he turns on a dime when he so-called “base” doesn’t like something he is doing. There was no dime that Hitler ever turned on, one of the world’s great tragedies.

Donald Trump has no moral or emotional resilience or death. At one point or another in his life, he has taken every position possible on the cultural battles of the day, from guns to abortion.  He has a special genius for turning cowards into acolytes.

He is good at being offensive, at waging pointless and even hopeless battles and at bullying and intimidation.

This view of Trump has been rattling around in my head for months now, but this week clarified it for me. Donald Trump is not about evil.  He is just about Trump.

That has been destructive, disturbing, even unconscionably cruel. It is also not something that alone can bring him to greater power or return him to it.

What people fear the most about him are  his fatal flaws.