“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” — Abraham Lincoln.

The “better angels of our nature” is a gorgeous phrase.

I wish I could write like Abraham Lincoln.

I thought of this beautiful quote today when I learned that President Trump refused to go to the capitol to pay his last respects to U.S. Rep John Lewis, one of the most loved and respected spirits of the civil rights movement and a moral force all his own.

Everyone who knew Lewis said the same thing about him.

He had been through a lot, suffered a great deal, risen from a sharecropper father’s poverty, and always, they said, looked to the better angels of human nature.

In the months before he died, he published some graphic novels about the civil rights movement, so kids who weren’t alive could read about it. Every morning, he tossed black jelly beans to his staff.

He never was quite able to forgive Donald Trump for what he saw as his ingrained racism; he refused to attend his inauguration or meet with him.

The two stood out in great contrast to one another today, and Lewis’s beautiful ceremony in the Capitol rotunda tells us a lot about the decision Americans face in just a few months.

Lewis was an immense spirit; Trump was a petty one, too small to forgive or accept a good man even in death, a man so beloved by the troubled, despairing, and angry African-American community.

It might have meant a lot to them, as it turned out, to have a President there, a gesture of respect if nothing else; but Lewis’s death meant nothing to him. He never forgot the inaugural snub.

It would have been a healing thing for him to do, Trump had plenty of time over the weekend to play golf while many thousands of people died,  and toss his big red MAGA hats out to fans lining the road to his golf course. He loved it.

There seem to be no better angels in him. Maybe they’ve fled from him or cursed him.

I always understood the phrase “better angels” to mean that under certain circumstances, we might rise above ourselves and go beyond what is expected of us, beyond what comes easily and naturally.

For me, it means digging more deeply into myself and thinking in a way that is more expansive, generous, and far-sighted than I can always be. Today was such a moment.

I imagine all of us are like that in a way, we want to be someone we can’t always be, and when we do rise to those angels, there is a feeling of great joy and hope. At least in me.

But like the pandemic, like the killing of George Floyd, like the fear and uncertainty so many Americans face now about their health, their children, their work, Donald Trump never seems to hear from the better angels of his nature.

Maybe there aren’t any.

Given a chance or choice, he seems to fall instead of rise, down to the darker angels of his soul, to the darkest spirits of our country.

I am weary of reading those cover-your-ass stories from the media about the many ways Donald Trump can win the election, about how much time there is left for him to adjust, to change course,  to admit wrongdoing.

Our media was humiliated in 2016, they were out of touch with the country then, and out of touch with the country now. To cover themselves against another humiliation, they spin all kinds of this-might-happen scenarios that are no more concrete than lighting a candle to see which way the wind is blowing.

They never really warned us what might happen in 2106 because they didn’t know. They don’t know now. Crystal balls don’t come with iPhones and computers. Those alarms and cautions seem cowardly to me, not useful or thoughtful.

What they no longer do – what I always do – is to believe what they see and feel, not what other people tell them to see and feel.  No poll guarantees the future; there are no guarantees in life.

If you want to consider what might happen to our country, just think for a moment how the life and death of John Lewis felt, and how the hate-spewing tweets of our President make our country feel.

The ceremony showed the world this; Lewis was a big man, Trump is a small one.

I am a betting man, and I would happily bet on this. The only way Donald Trump can win this election legally is to have some kind of open-heart surgery. His heart died many years ago.

To understand Donald Trump and why he can’t succeed in November, one has to consider the question even Trump’s most loyal supporters are asking: why hasn’t the President even pretended to project a sense of command over the coronavirus crisis or portrayed a sliver of compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it?

Why didn’t he adjust sooner and realize that it was so much in his interest for achieving every one of his goals – from economic recovery to victory in November – to face up to the virus and do everything possible to conquer it?

If Trump had taken Dr. Fauci’s advice in February or March, the economy might be reopening now; the virus might have been contained, jobs coming back rather than disappearing.

But the pundits have no answers; Trump hypnotizes them and confounds them at the same time. Meanwhile, terrified citizens have to guess what is happening to their country, and fret about November.

I think the answer has to do with soul and spirit, with the bigness of spirit and smallness, with the difference between John Lewis, a man of enormous warmth and moral vision, and Donald Trump, who seems to have none that lifts the soul.

What a dark place his heart must be. In her epilogue to her runaway best-selling book, Mary Trump, his niece,  explains her uncle’s behavior clearly and convincingly.

First, she wrote,  he suffers from a delusion, what the shrinks call “magical thinking.” He is not able to admit errors or mistakes; he believes that if he has done something, it must be the right thing.

While Lincoln insisted that we must not be “enemies,” Trump believes most of the citizens in his car us are enemies – liberals, scientists, progressives, Democrats, conservatives, many Republicans. Some people swear absolute loyalty, as to a King, and there are people raised in a democracy, who embrace questioning, challenging even protest.

Every one of the latter  – at least half of the country – is an enemy to him; there are no better or forgiving angels for him to turn. There is no way of acknowledging defeat or changing or listening. To be a friend to him is to be a slave to him.

Trump has persuaded many of his supporters that we are enemies to them. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. That cannot happen as long as Donald Trump is President.

If you are King and you will away the dreadful virus, then it will go away because you want it to. If you have spent your whole life bullying and dodging and lying your way out of trouble, then why shouldn’t it work again?

In his language and public presence, Trump sees himself as supernatural, as a superhero who can make no mistakes. Pandemics are not loyal to Kings, they have their own directions.

Mary Trump put her finger on it when she described her uncle as a petty little man, “ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin.”

There is no joy in writing that about a President, he is my President and our President, and we all need for him to succeed and lead.

He can pretend to dance, but he can’t dance.

Watching him read from those leaden Let’s- Pretend- I’m- A- President -Who Cares speeches he is giving now, trapped like a wounded animal but unable to find those angels, Donald Trump is stuck in his myth: since no one has done or ever could do a better job than him, how could he and why would he admit to needing to change?

Could Donald Trump win another election as President? I’m not into cover-you-ass journalism. People deserve the truth as I see it, and then take their chances from there.

The ceremony sent my subconscious back to a sad and lonely place, but a place of truth and meaning. It’s not a story I ever told before.

President Trump reminds me of a hospice visit I made to a cabin in the Adirondacks with my dog Izzy to visit a dying logger who had prostate cancer.

It was too far and too late for the county’s hospice nurses to come, the old man had called me at home and begged to see Izzy, my hospice dog, who was the only living thing he would speak to.

Carl refused to speak to doctors or nurses, only to Izzy. He held a wooden carving of his own dead border collie in his hand, he asked to be buried with him.

I held his hand while he gasped and died right in front of me. His eyes were frozen open, and I couldn’t feel any breath. I’d seen it a dozen times.

Izzy jumped off of the bed and lay down in a corner. He would never stay near a dead person.

There was no pulse, but suddenly I saw a vein in his neck beating like a heartbeat. In something of a panic, I called the hospice nurse at home and said I thought Carl might still be alive.

She was sympathetic. “Oh no,” she said, “he’s got a pacemaker, it keeps beating for a long time after the patient dies.”

He was already dead but his heart was still beating.

Watching some video from the Lewis memorial, seeing how much he meant to so many people, hearing Trump mutter that he wouldn’t go as if it were the dumbest idea he had ever heard, I thought this:

This is why this man won’t win in November. He just is too small.