One of the great ironies of  Trumpism is that so many of its followers, even the so-called Christians,  are wary and mistrustful of the needy and the vulnerable, who they feel are dirty and dangerous,  take advantage of us and waste our resources.

The irony is this: their beloved leader, Donald Trump, turns out to be the neediest and most vulnerable of us all, according to a wrenching new book about him.

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So where are we today on the story of the runaway train we call our President and his all-encompassing campaign to stay in power?

The wolves are circling and smell blood. The pandemic is out of control. This is far beyond what the polls say, or what the pundits shout on TV.

Reading some excerpts from his niece Mary Trump’s new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, coming out Tuesday,   I found her insights into the President’s life and childhood riveting, even poignant.

And her stories are credible, mostly because we already know and have seen that almost everything she says is right. So far, she is the only person able to tell us where Donald Trump really came from.

This is especially relevant today, as the Supreme Court sets up the President for what some call a victory, and others, including me, see as the most dangerous investigation yet into the darkest side of his life.

John Roberts can take credit for saving him for now, but he has also just thrown him under the bus.

From the President and Mary Trump’s book, I get the sense of a fragile and deeply troubled personality abused in childhood and now facing a closing circle of challenges and dangers

His missteps will torment and unhinge him. And they will almost certainly trigger another round of crippling mistakes just when he needs to be disciplined and strategic.

In many ways, the story of Donald Trump is not about power. It’s about children and what cruelty can do to them and turn them into.

The thing that I learn from watching Trump these last few days and reading Mary Trump’s book is not that he is strong and fierce, but that he is small and weak.

He is one of the most fragile public figures I can remember seeing.

There is no slight too small or trivial to enrage him, or that he can leave behind.

People have created a monster Trump in their minds, as he wants to be seen in that way, but he is really a five-year-old with a country he has to pretend he can run.

Presidents have a lot of power, perhaps too much, we are learning. But the White House can also be a place for a wounded child to hide and plot and pay back the world.

Consider these insights, unchallenged even by some of Trump’s closest friends: Mary writes that Trump’s ego “is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”

Ms. Trump, a trained and experienced clinical psychologist who wrote her scathing yet somewhat empathetic book about the President, persuaded me early on that Donald Trump is not capable of either discipline or strategic thinking.

He is not capable of thinking ahead or making reasoned judgments. He is not capable of righting himself; he can only be himself and hope for the best. He doesn’t have another lane.

As we can see every day, every decision he makes refers back to him and his naked narcissism.

This illness is what makes him plow ahead with catastrophes like Tulsa, which was all about his ego, not his judgment, or the coronavirus, which cannot simply be denied and wished away without penalty.

In a job with great responsibility to others, he never gets one step away from himself. When he tries to look caring, he lowers his voice and looks down. He just looks false, he can’t even fake it.

Yes, the polls will go up and down, and yes, the election will go up and down, that’s what they do. But it’s apparent that this is a deeply flawed human being who is under far too much pressure given his fractured psyche and aloneness to respond to anything but his own needs and desires.

Why I wonder, can’t journalists say what they know? I guess, to be generous because it changes the narrative they need to present to be relevant and valuable. What will become of them when the game is over?

As awful as his presidency has been, this is a very small and frail man with a cold and disheartening story acting out his nightmares right in front of everyone day after day.

It is hard for me to watch, but also impossible to ignore. He lashes out and reaches into every corner of our lives. Don’t we all know a kid like that, whose anger hides his fear?

Mary Trump’s style is credible and urgent, and more importantly, it squares with almost everything we see and feel about this man, nearly destroyed by his cruel and domineering father when he was young.

The media is playing it’s usual who won-who lost parlor game after the Supreme Court ruling today that found that Donald Trump is not above the law. They also kept his tax returns out of the public eye through the election.

The pundits are already fighting about who won and who lost as if this is the playoff round before the World Series.

There are no winners to be found anywhere in this latest chapter of the Fall of Donald Trump, the title of the next big book about him.

Nothing – nothing – has obsessed Trump more than his belief that he is above the law and cannot be questioned, investigated, disagreed with, or reproached. It is the most consistent and obsessive theme of his presidency, his defining value.

It has been driving him crazy from the first days in office.

The law does not apply to him, nobody – not Congress, Democrats, Special Prosecutors, Whistle-Blowers, Watchdogs, U.S. Senators – have the right defy or block or challenge him.

He even claimed on national TV that he had full power to tell all the governors what to do about the coronavirus. He never mentioned it again.

The bodies of people who tried to rein him in are all over Washington, indeed all around his business associates in New York City. There, Trump was always considered a joke. Now, he is regarded as an awful and scary joke, like the fictional Joker himself.

How would you like to be waiting over the next year for your worse nightmare to come into being? The thing you have feared the most and fought the hardest to keep from happening is now certain to happen.

I feel a bit alone when it comes to writing about what I see as a wrenching political Death Watch- people write about Trump as if he were Zeus –  but I’m not into the he-said, she-said thing.

Anybody can see it. He is choking on grievance and self-pity.

I know what I see, and I am grateful to be free to write it. People need to make up their minds, but the pattern becomes clearer almost by the day.

The fact that a team of prosecutors and investigators have me in their sights for many months ahead would be an awful prospect for me or a healthy person to wait for and live with. It’s a dread nightmare for a paranoid narcissist who has so much to hide.

When one considers the extraordinary effort he has put into hiding his financial secrets, Sherlock himself could only conclude there must be something awful to hide.

Look how furious and unmoored the Russian investigation and the impeachment investigation left him; he still tweets about it every day. He tries to smear, silence, even jail, his political opponents, who he blames for it.

Reading Mary Trump’s book, I see that it is because he is terrified of everyone who threatens him in any way, from a 16-year-old girl to Angela Merkel to Joe Biden.

Now,  when he needs to be savvy and articulate and strategic, he is none of those things. He is not able to be any of those things.

His race-baiting will work with some people, but this is a different America than he faced even four years ago. The corporate and civic and medical and educational structure of the country is mobilizing against him in shocking and previously unimaginable ways.

The clock is ticking, whether we see the tax returns or never see them. I can’t say I care.

We can just imagine what’s in them. In a sense, it’s a juicy weapon for Joe Biden.

The people who have investigated him say they know what’s in there: the answer to his unwavering deference to Alexandr Putin. What else could it be? We know about his debts and bankruptcies and frauds.

What could be worse?

What else would frighten him so much and get him to fight so hard?

Trump’s ego has taken an awful – and to a narcissist, unacceptable –  beating in recent weeks, from Tulsa to his Bible photo-op to the NFL to Nascar to a pandemic he and his allies have not found a way to threaten or control.

To look bigger, he runs to the big mountain and gives the audience a show, fireworks and jet planes, and bands. If you can’t cajole, children, you distract them.

The Tik-Tok kids – he is now threatening to ban the site in America – pulled off the mask. Trump is picking up where they left off. Kim Jong Un blew up the negotiating building. The Iranians ignore and defy him.  His former friend Xi Jinping shut down freedom of speech in Hong Kong, and no longer speaks to him.

Generals and corporate execs are abandoning him, Dr. Fauci, confined now to podcasts,  has broken out of his confinement, his Jacksonville coronation is in great trouble, and even the stock market has started to tremble again as new realities sing in.

“While thousands of Americans die alone,” wrote Mary Trump in her book, “Donald touts stock market gains.”

The narcissist sees every event as a salute or slight to him, from Mt.Rushmore to the Fourth of July, to Tulsa to Jacksonville. But he has dug himself a big hole, and he keeps digging.

Wouldn’t we all wish to return to our biggest successes? Most of us know we can’t.

Jacksonville is in trouble; there, he faces another humiliating disaster and reality check at the moment of his supposed greatest triumph. More than 500 people in Tulsa now have the virus; health officials say they got it at the rally.

He made it; he did it, he ran, he won, he battled and dodged and plotted and weaved and schemed, and survived every rock and missile and mine in his path.

Now, on the eve of another great victory, the ground under his feet is shaking and crumbling and sinking.

He has neither the psychological or spiritual strength to handle it, as Mary Trump and his behavior make clear.

If you believe in psychology at all – I’ve had too many years of therapy – it’s all there to see. The fear, the rage, the flight, the bad decisions.

I don’t ever compare myself to a President, but I can say I’ve been to that awful place.

Covered in all that fear and bluster and hiding, it’s almost impossible to make a good decision, and if you try, you just look worse and weaker than before. There is nothing more disturbing than a sick man trapped and with nowhere to go.

There is nothing more healing than knowing the truth about yourself.

Today Fauci today urged cities with a growing virus to consider shutting down again; he said the pandemic was becoming his worst nightmare.

The President said again he doesn’t agree with him.

I don’t believe it matters one bit when and if we see his tax returns. The Supreme Court ruling casts another very dark cloud over a man who can’t handle them.

The people who dislike him also know who he is, and nothing he has done would surprise them. The people who love him don’t care what the tax returns tell us.

Once those records get into the hands of prosecutors, the world will see whatever it is that Donald Trump has tried so desperately to hide all of these years. If he is not in the office, he will be even more powerless to stop it.

That is precisely what he seems unable to bear. If he believes he could shoot someone on Park Avenue and get away with it, why would he care what’s in those returns?

In great desperation, he turns to the people who love him so blindly and ignores the very people who might save him.

The protests have toned down; the dread Antifa have yet to appear.

The radical leftists are not to be found; Joe Biden is happy in his basement, corporations and schools are abandoning the confederacy in overwhelming numbers, all kinds of athletes, black and white, are getting ready to kneel when the national anthems are played.

And get this: Yesterday, Disney signed up Colin Kaepernick, the father of the taking the knee movement, to a first-look deal  via his production firm to “focus on telling scripted and unscripted stories that explore race, social injustice, and the quest for equity.”

This is the man President Trump called a “son-of-a-bitch” just two years ago. This is not the America of 2016. When Disney, NASCAR, Coca-Cola, FedEx,  and the NFL blow you off, you are in the muck. They know where the wind blows.

Every one of them has a message for the President. You are wrong, and we don’t need to listen to you.

He will surely do a lot of damage along the way. All the way back to slavery, white people have feared a black revolution. Many sociologists even trace police brutality back to this primal fear.

Every police reporter – I was one – knows that a cop who shoots a black man for no reason is often not a racist.

Most often, he has been taught to be afraid of black people, even kids. Trump is playing to that; it is vampiric but often effective.

The President’s bumbling and stumbling about the coronavirus will haunt him.

Now, he has once again reclaimed ownership of the virus as his own by insisting schools open fully in the Fall, whether the doctors like it or not.

That means he will own every illness and death every child or their family suffers right up to the campaign. Every death of every kid and every teacher will be on him. No one except Sean Hannity will let him forget it, either.

Trump set it up so that people would blame the governors, now there is no one to blame but him, and his obedient governors are scurrying for cover like rats.

The Supreme Court has re-ignited the darkest, most paranoid, and dangerous part of President Trump – nothing has terrified or distracted or unraveled him more than the prospect of being investigated by prosecutors and investigators that he can’t control.

Reading those excerpts, I felt sorry for Trump. If he were anyone else, we would all feel sorry for him. Because he can’t feel empathy for anyone but himself, people can’t feel any pity for him.

So it turns. If he were still a child, he would break our hearts.  And in many ways, he is still a child. Some kids do not get the chance to grow up.

There is nothing ahead for him but more trouble, more humiliation, more recrimination, more enemies, more traitors and cowards heading for the hills.

He knows now that he is not above the law, and that is the very last place he ever wanted to be. In his head, he is weaker, more impulsive, more frightened and desperate than ever before. And it shows.

The real story of Donald Trump can’t be found in the White House, as John  Bolton and so many others have learned.

It can only be understood through the story of his family, as ours define our stories.

It is not a story of power, but rather of how we damage our young and turn them into lost and dangerous souls.

That may be the most important part of the legacy he will leave behind.