Of all the memorable images I’ve seen this year, I think the most powerful and enduring is this one, taken by a Portland, Oregon, protester.

It is of the Portland moms marching in front of their kids to protect them.

The photograph is remarkable; for me, it has come to define the stirring and frightening escalation of the last chapters of Donald Trump’s disintegrating presidency.

I need to say that I am moved by the courage and eloquence of democracy’s newest and most fearsome champions. They are not wearing riot gear or sitting in the White House.

In Portland, they called them the “wall of moms,” they carried signs telling the federal troops to “leave our sons alone.” The feds might as well have been the  Redcoats marching to Lexington to break up the radical mobs of yore.

It is also about the moms and women government officials all over the country, many of them governors, mayors, and authors.

The big story was all about women yesterday.

These are the new and rising class of tough and articulate political women, many of them black. They are transforming the country; it is underway.

They are challenging the angry old entrenched white men, icons of the past, like their precious statues to treason.

They are calling them out and driving them nuts all over the country, from Washington to Georgia to Florida, Chicago, Portland, and Atlanta.

Yesterday, wherever I looked, I saw the new patriots standing up to the would-be tyrant.

“Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all,” wrote Vera Nazarian in The Perpetual Calendar of inspiration. “It’s a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings — our school, team, city, state, our immediate society — often ultimately delineated by our ethnic roots and borders… but not always.”

Patriotism was those moms, those mayors, those governors.

Sometimes patriotism is delineated by tyranny and justice, like mothers coming out in force and locking arms to stop men in combat suits and masks from grabbing their sons and daughters off the street and tossing them into vans.

Sometimes it’s standing up to the most powerful man in the world and saying, “no,  you can’t.”

This invasion of a city with duly elected officials was almost sickeningly un-American, even the white nationalist militias were upset by it. They are using their imaginations.

We all realize intuitively if they can do it to them, they can do it to us.

The President is coming apart at the seams, day by day, one blunder and lie after another, coming so fast it’s hard to absorb them, which is the idea.

Even the raccoon’s nest on the top of his head is wilting, his bald spots shining through with sweat.

Donald Trump is the women’s Dr. Frankenstein, he made them in so many ways, but he cannot control them.

He reminds us every day now just how important they are now, and I suspect these women will do more than anyone to save our Republic. I remember Muriel Bowser, the fiesty and articulate mayor Washington, D.C., showing up in her mommy clothes to create Black Lives Matter Plaza right across from the White house.

And I think of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms who has provoked the Governor of Georgia into suing her for demanding her citizens wear masks. In the suit, he asked that she be forbidden to speak against him or criticize him.

Good luck with that. Mayor Bottoms is at home, recovering from the coronavirus.

The women are shouting from their offices everywhere that the President-who-would-be-king has no clothes, no strategy, no or accomplishments or skills other than a knack for saying he is great so often that many of his desperate and needy citizens – dwindling in numbers every day –  believed him.

Tuesday, as the virus death toll skyrocketed, The President finally scheduled a press conference to talk about the coronavirus as his poll numbers crashed through the floor.

His big news was that things would probably get worse before they got better.

Duh.

It will surely get worse if he and his team of sycophants have anything to say about it since most of them insist is not even real. There is nothing more awkward than faking sincerity or responsibility.

My grandmother would have called this press conference  a “galloping bowl of Gornisht.” That is to say, nothing. Trump inspired and comforted no one, another lost opportunity one of the last.

We get it, he just can’t do it.

Yesterday, he said the civil unrest in cities like Portland “run by Democratic mayors” was worse than Afghanistan was, ever.” No one has died in the Portland protests, 2,372 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, 20,320 were wounded.

Trump has put himself in another awful box trying to convince us that he cares about the virus.

Since he is responsible for nothing and everything he did was great, how could he possibly do anything differently or better now? And why would he?

We have the lowest mortality rate in the world except for the fact that we don’t. The virus will vanish any day now, except maybe not. We are, he conceded in a bit of a bump.

So the man who knows the least about pandemic viruses did the talking, the man who did the most was not invited to speak at all. More Wonderland.

Trump called the missing and missed Dr. Fauci an alarmist, which in Trumpseak means he tells the truth.

I’m beginning to understand something Mary Trump explained in her book. Trump is neither whole nor healthy. In a sense, he isn’t responsible for what he does, and he has never been.

She says he is dangerous, and I see that, but he is mostly ineffective. He finishes nothing, follows through on nothing, is incapable of offering hope or salve.

His miserable and wasteful wall is coming apart; people are tunneling under it and climbing over it. Send in the clowns.

Perspective is critical right now; the next few months will be rough. But the trajectory could not be more apparent, the outcome never more obvious.

I take no pleasure in saying this because I love journalism, but the truth of this meltdown is not the story that gets ratings or earns money.

They need to keep the ball game going; they need to frighten people and sound ever more frightening alarms. Fear sells; hope doesn’t.

People who are frightened watch the news, and when they watch the news, they get more frightened, and then they watch more news, and the cable stations make a ton of money, billions.

It is ghoulish for sure. But it is true. Nothing makes people watch the news more than suggesting some evil force is coming to take over our country.

But you sir, are no Hitler. You’re not even a Mussolini.

Both men were a lot smarter and better organized than President Trump ever was or is. I do not believe for a minute that he is out to slaughter millions of people, he is out to be praised and celebrated as the greatest thing ever, always, and in every way.

Donald Trump is terrified of critics, dodged the draft, hides from the truth, betrays friends, dreads being found out as a fraud, and most of all worries about not being the most significant thing that ever happened in the world, of not being perfect, beautiful, there was never anything like him.

If we would all just stop pounding on him and praise his greatness, I imagine he would purr like a kitten and stop tearing our country apart.

He just wants us to love him, and we stubbornly and callously refuse to fawn, although he has no trouble finding people to do it. The problem is, his critics are so many and well placed that there is no time to get rid of them all.

Millions of people do love him, but it is not enough; it can never be enough.

The coronavirus was so much bigger than his lies, and so are those amazing women who are not afraid to stand up to him and call him out. As a man, it’s a bit awkward to say it, but they sure make the men look like wussies.

Get upset at what Trump does, by all means, but I draw the line at being afraid of him. I see the damage he is doing; it is real.

This week, President Trump scared the hell out of battered and shell-shocked Democrats, liberals and progressives. It appeared as if he really might be taking the country by force.

I don’t see it that way.

When I step back, Trump is as menacing as the Marx Brothers. His presidency is a circus; he is just what the founders feared the most, except he heads the gang that can’t shoot straight. He has so many balls in the air, a lot of them are landing on his head.

He can’t strategize, listen, or change. All he can do is lie and bluster.

I am as far from a brave warrior as you can get and still be alive, but I am not afraid of this man. Watching him, I feel mostly pity and more and more,  contempt. Lately, some sympathy. I am so grateful not to live in his head, not that there’s any more room up there.

For sure, he and his acolytes are doing a lot of damage, even to the point of letting people die needlessly.

But the great accounting has begun, nobody will ever stop those moms in Oregon, or lie away from the ghosts and victims of the pandemic. History will run him down likes dogs chasing a fox.

When you despair, look at the courage and skill of these women mayors, governors, senators, reporters and anchors, and moms. And offer them thanks and good wishes. They are the new heroes protecting our freedom.

For the third day in a row, this wall of moms, some conspicuously pregnant, walked right into the tear gas Trump’s personal militia fired at them in front of Portland’s federal building.

Tonight, it’s rumored that the dads are coming too.

They will be there tomorrow. Trump’s militia runs out, fires gas, runs back.

At the same time, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned that she would not allow heavily armed U.S. Border Patrol riot police – the President’s own private militia –  into the city.

Oregon Mayor Kate Brown called the presence of these secret agents  a “blatant abuse of power.” She plans on suiting the federal government.

Mayor Lightfoot vowed that Trump would not be permitted to send unidentifiable agents in combat gear into Chicago, only agents of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol And Tobacco could come.

By late afternoon, federal authorities agreed and made clear their new, more limited intensions.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois (who lost both legs in Afghanistan) warned President Trump “don’t even think about it” when he bragged of sending his Mutant Ninja Turtle warriors to Chicago.

If you wanted to do something meaningful to promote law and order, taunted Sen. Duckworth, how about background checks and curbing illegal handgun sales?

The moms promised to keep coming back to Portland’s federal courthouse until those agents who have been pulled citizens into unmarked cars without identifying themselves were gone.

My money is on them.

Another disaster for Trump, another rallying point for the people who hate him, another increasingly desperate effort to distract people from the pandemic that is chewing up his presidency and his prized economy.

When nothing works day after day, each new enterprise seems more desperate and contrived. People have only so much trust and goodwill in them, Trump has used most of his up.

What a fine line between a tyrant and a joke.

Trump has an almost mystical and primal ability to upset and alarm people on the other side of the political spectrum. As he turns followers into worshippers, he also turns opponents into warriors.

Disaster hovers all around him. Even Fox News almost completely unraveled him in a Sunday interview with Chris Wallace. Did Joe Biden promise to defund the police, as Trump charged?

“No, sir, he didn’t,” said Wallace.

Trump, sweating like a guilty middle school kid caught cheating, fumbled and stumbled and sweated in the hot Washington sun.

Another defining image. Trump knows how to dissemble, it’s in his blood, but there is something to the idea that truth will out, sooner or later, and one way or the other.

What Trump is doing is upsetting, even infuriating.

But is it frightening or terrifying? No, not to me. Mary Trump’s book crystallized and affirmed many of the things I’ve been thinking about our deeply troubled President.

This is not a man who follows through on anything. He can’t.

This is not a man who has the strength and skill to take over the country or refuse to accept a national election. After the election, he has a rendezvous with some prosecutors in New York City.

His soul is crammed with illusion, there is no reality there.

Trump is trapped in his lies. His recurring narrative is that he has done a great job; no one in the history of anything has done anything better than he has.

Without Daddy to protect him and bail him out, he only has a bunch of advisers, much like him – losers and ideologues in a world filled with sharp knives and sharks and tons of scrutiny.

One by one, they all get carved up and spit out.

I didn’t get it fully until I read Mary Trump’s book, a telling psychological portrait of a screwed -up and cruel family.

Every day, I see a pathetic little man just like the one Mary Trump described – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and mired in his delusional spin.

Mary Trump finally explained to us how he came to be. But Fyodor Dostoevsky was first, he got to the core of Donald Trump:

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself,” Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov.  “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

Donald  Trump can’t come out of it because he can’t accept or even see that it is true. He can’t stop lying to himself.

“And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country indeed consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how real love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?  – Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand Of Darkness