“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” – H.L. Mencken.

I’m writing this post today for one reason only: to prepare all of you for this: this election will get a lot uglier and more disturbing before it gets resolved. Things will get substantially worse before they get better.

Remember, you asked for it.

I also believe things will get better, but no one should fool themselves into thinking the skies will all clear on the morning of November 4.

In many ways, this election is about fear.

A considerable segment of the American population will be angry, frightened, and aggrieved no matter who wins. Each side will feel cheated if they lose, the bad feeling all around is intense.

The far-right is much more skilled than the left at frightening people, although the left is catching up.

This week, Tucker Carlson promised his viewers on Fox News that if Biden wins the election, 20 million illegal and new immigrants will flood the nation overnight – literally – and make sure a Republican never wins the presidency again.

Tucker Carlson is way too smart to believe this for a second, but people listen to cable news commentators sometimes, and even to Presidents.

At the same time, the President was tweeting that the “Black Lives Matter” signs and paintings go up around the country are hate crimes.  He is also promising to keep confederate statues standing and to reverse federal regulations that make it harder to discriminate against minorities in America’s suburbs.

Republicans are good at these sorts of things; white suburbanites have always been vulnerable to the idea that hordes of black people are eager to storm their towns to molest their wives, lower their property values and knock them on the heads.

When we see those stomach-churning videos of suburban women and men pointing rifles, pistols, and assault weapons at black people or black protestors committing no crimes, many people are appalled.

We wonder if this could be America, not Syria or Argentina.

But this is important:  Donald Trump and many of his supporters are delighted,  not appalled. Civil rights leaders like John Lewis have seen this dance many times over the years.

We have to think of this election as akin to walking through Fun House mirror walls. No one sees everything in the same way. Whatever one side sees, the other denies.

We are blind to everything but our own egos.

Things are going according to plan if white people point guns on black people. I hate to be cynical, but this isn’t subtle.

If the President could get millions of more suburbanites to feel that way and act that way, he’d be a shoo-in.  His message is that protests, even legal and peaceful ones, are to be feared.

They signal chaos and disorder.

And he’s doing everything in his power to make that happen.

I should say before all those hearts start flittering that this time it does seem to be different.

Trump’s grotesque bungling of the pandemic is even more frightening and appalling to many suburban people – especially women –  than even integration or equality.

The Democrats have nothing remotely as powerful or frightening to offer; they look especially timid and tongue-tied. But there is plenty of fear to go around.

One of their biggest weapons is the specter of Trump returning for four more years. That prospect is getting a lot of people moving.

In trying so hard to look tough, Trump has also managed to look unhinged and scary.

That might be just terrifying enough to do it.

The Democrats also have a mushrooming pandemic that is panicking Americans once again and shutting down the economy and normal life once again.

The pandemic is now racing out of control while Nero tweets about statues honoring people most of us have never heard of. This issue does not touch people nearly as directly as the pandemic has.

Instead of keeping the statues intact, the smart play would be to lead a national effort to make the pandemic go away.

That might be a winning strategy.

For once, that seems to have transcended the benefits of the American political tradition of race-baiting for power and profit.

No one is buying the idea that Joe Biden is a radical leftie or a corrupt politician. You, sir, are no Hilary Clinton.

For one thing, he is about as radical as a telephone pole, for another, he just doesn’t look slimy or sneaky or corrupt. He seems nice. This mud isn’t sticking.

And Trump has that awful, cheese-curdling scowl, beneath a nest on his head a raccoon could live in.

It’s unfortunate, but the scariest wins.

For reasons that are neither clear nor understandable, President Trump has chosen to speak only to about one-third of the American People; everyone else is dismissed as a loser or a radical or a crook.

I take being dismissed personally as a citizen and voter, and so do many other people.

So everyone else feels excluded and offended. Alienating and ignoring two-thirds to 40 percent of the electorate has not historically proven to be a smart election strategy.

This election will remind no one of the birth of democracy in Classical Athens, where the seeds of Western civilization were sown.

Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, Perikles were just a few of the statesmen, philosophers playwrights and orators, historians, and artists who flourished in Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. when the idea of a free and open and elected government came to life.

Politics was considered honorable, even noble.

Greek democracy attracted the wisest and most ethical of people. The American version is different. It’s best not to take it too seriously, warned Mencken.

“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents,”  he wrote, “he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”

In the United States in 2020, our version of democracy would make mud wrestling look like the New York Metropolitan Opera.

There are no good or uplifting discussions and debates to inspire people.

The marketers have taken over the temple; the rush is on to scare the wits out of the greatest number of people and see how angry and poorly-informed all of us can be.

But there is a lot at stake.

My purpose in writing about politics again is not to add to the din, but to help people understand this very complex, divisive, and sometimes disturbing election.

From the reaction so far, this has been helpful to some people, disturbing to others. I am called to do it.

I want to say that I am prepared for this election to get a lot worse before it gets a lot better. At the moment, Donald Trump seems hell-bent on blowing his campaign up.

He’s got all the money in the world, but no idea what to do with it. Money buys a lot, but it can’t buy everything and everyone.

President Trump has just enough time to get in a few more disasters against the wrenching backdrop of sick and dying Americans.

The next two scheduled catastrophes are his Fourth of July appearance at Mt. Rushmore and his nomination in Jacksonville, Fla. There, his convention is coming just as the virus settles in.

A really good producer would broadcast from a hospital, not one of America’s most grand dated cliches.

Those figures on the mountain have about as much to do with the lives of Americans today as Aunt Jemima did. The carved heads will not be wearing masks.

What Trump just doesn’t get is that this is not a time to flaunt his greatness, or blow his balloon bigger. It’s time to instead flaunt his empathy and management skills.

As far as Covid-19, the biggest story in a half-century, is concerned, he has shown neither. I guess there isn’t much he can do about that.

The pandemic is the problem, not grandiose backdrops before cheering crowds in red hats that show us how narcissistic and self-absorbed he is.

I apologize for my earlier comments that Donald Trump is a great producer. These clunky, heavy-handed, insensitive, and tone-deaf productions are wrong in every way for America in this troubled summer of 2020.

It is now Joe Biden’s election to lose, and no matter what Trump says about him, he is neither senile nor stupid.

He’s been in a lot of rodeos, and so far, he’s playing things like a maestro, moving at his own pace and in his own way.

Trump did understand from the first that Biden was his most significant threat. He was right about that. That appears to be his last insight.

The key to understanding this election right now is Donald Trump and his flailing and urgent recklessness. That’s what’s going to make it so ugly. That’s what’s going to make him lose.

He is the man behind the curtain, the darling of the great corporate media machine (they love him, no matter what he or they say), the overwhelmingly dominant figure in our politics in 2020.

There is no one else close.

But his show is running out of gas, his ratings headed in the wrong direction, his enemies lining up to the horizon. Politics, like TV, is just as ruthless as he is.

There is no love for losers.

This is as honest an assessment as I can make, and I believe it to be true.

I understand that any criticism of the President is taken as a kind of social treason by many. It’s okay; 30 years of writing online has given me the hide of a Triceratops.

Never let the peckerheads and toothless ducks and midgets get you down.

People need to understand that Trumpism has spawned a nearly equivalent extreme movement on the other side.

Trump has moved the Republican Party far to the right, but he has also moved elements in the Democratic Party far to the left.

Each side believes it was spawned by God and is destined to seize control of the country and lead it, if only they become rigid and unyielding.

That’s possible, but it’s equally likely that these extremes will continue to stalemate one another and tear the country apart.

Watch the November election to see what I mean.

Trump has given the finger to moderates and the middle and people like me. If he loses the election, it will be because of them, not because America has finally chosen a different, warmer path.

Somewhere out there, there is a Churchill or Mandela or even a Thatcher to break the logjam. As sure as there are autocrats, there are leaders to come behind them.

Trump is a demagogue by every definition of the world. Mencken was right. Trump is continually preaching doctrines he knows to be untrue and that he knows nothing about.

I wouldn’t call his followers idiots by any means, but they don’t object to being lied to, which is their fatal flaw. They don’t yet grasp that they have been betrayed once again.

And that is a sad thing.

The problem with demagogues, Mencken added, is that sooner or later, they have to govern, and that is where every single one of them goes down in flames, all through human history.

The Greeks had the right idea. Out of darkness, light.