“Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression. The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.” – James Madison.

Let’s get down to the heart of it.

Trump is the leader of an aggrieved and angry festering white working-class rebellion in America.

This is a group suffering greatly from government neglect and fighting to retain the political, religious, and cultural traditions of the country as they see and value them.

There is mounting evidence to suggest that Trump is failing to keep the keep-America-white movement alive, and is instead helping to speed the dying of whiteness as America’s dominant business and political force.

The white fortresses that once surrounded so many communities and professions and issues relating to women and minorities are crumbling. In sociological terms, the changes in America are not stoppable, something the Republican Party will have to reckon with for many years to come.

Women are moving rapidly into law, medicine, business, and entertainment, and blacks and immigrants and people of color are moving into white-suburban and rural areas and forming the elements of a new kind of America, which certainly includes white people but is diminishing their centrality and power.

In a few years, whites will be a minority in America for the first time, no matter how much Trump seeks to block immigration.

I think it is helpful to see this election as a battle over whiteness and color, a kind of desperate last stand.

Whiteness is a tricky thing to define. All whites are not alike by any means, but it is Trump who framed this conflict as a struggle between whites and “others” from the beginning.

In this way, by proclaiming himself the only thing that stands between chaos and violence, he deliberately widens the divide and stirs fear.

His latest campaign ad shows an elderly white woman fumbling for her phone in terror while some unseen home invaders are coming up the stairs.

We all know who the ad is talking about.  It says no one will be safe if Joe Biden is President.

From the beginning, Trump has flirted with white nationalist groups and presented immigrants and many urban blacks as a danger to civilization, rapists and parasites and thieves.

His intense support for confederate flags and statues has been rejected even by NASCAR, the NFL, the NBA,  and Coca-Cola. It doesn’t come close to his handling of the pandemic as a campaign issue, according to polling.

His famous “build the wall” campaign in 2016 was quite blunt in suggesting only he would protect America from rapists, gang members, and drug dealers. And no, Mexico did not pay for the wall.

His support base is limited to roughly one-third of the country; he has never really tried to expand it, a dark streak in his persona, but a very foolish political decision.

To me, Trump has become the leader and de facto champion of angry white America. And the people he has demonized now outnumber the people who support him. The numbers look bad for President Trump.

He seems not to know how radically different these new coalitions and demographics have emerged right under his nose.  Or perhaps, he believes he is invincible.

People overseas message me every day to ask the same question: “what is happening to America?”

In promoting fear and bigotry, Trump has directly or indirectly brought attention and support to the MeToo movement, the most successful women’s movement in generations; Black Lives Matter, now the largest social movement in American history, and Walls Of Moms, a mushrooming national coalition of mothers working closely with BLM to defeat the President.

Beyond that, Barack Obama and other black political leaders are quickly moving to organize a new voting rights movement, already forming in many Republican and Southern states.

It’s leaders mean to invoke the spirit and drive of the civil rights movement, and Obama has the clout and credibility to make it a major campaign issue.

Obama is getting into it; he made this clear in his speech at the funeral of John Lewis.

For people struggling to make sense of America, I would recommend Jonathan Metzl’s jarring book Dying Of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is killing America’s Heartland.

Nothing has puzzled political scientists more than the eagerness of the white working class to associate themselves with the very leaders and politicians who have caused them so much suffering.

All over the country, rural Trump supporters are getting black and blue protest flags in favor of the police and of “whiteness” and shouting “All Lives Matter” at demonstrators. Once again, they are eagerly lining up to be left behind once more.

It is a tragedy that they haven’t yet realized that their natural allies are the protesters and the members of Black Lives Matter, not Donald Trump and his billionnaire donors and affluent kids.

In his book, Metzl details this great contradiction.

In six years of research, he traveled across Trump’s “Red States,” the midwestern and southern United States. Between 2013 and 2018, he went to cities and small towns in Tennesse, Kansas, Missouri – the places  Sarah Palin once called the “real America.”

He asked people about the most urgent and bitterly contested political issues of America – health care, guns, taxes,  education, and the scope and purpose of government.

“I wanted to learn how people balanced anti-government or pro-gun attitudes,” he wrote, while at the same time navigating lives impacted by poor or no health care,  skyrocketing gun-related morbidity, underfunded infrastructures and institutions, epidemic opioid abuse, suicides and shortening life spans.

He found a diversity of opinions, but mostly, he found support for a set of political positions that directly harmed the health, safety and well being, and those of their own families.

He found what the rest of us have seen for a while now – many different groups of Americans now have nothing in common with each other.

Up to now, Trump’s entire campaign focus has been on feeding racial resentment and keeping his heartland followers angry and fighting against their self-interests.

Trump doesn’t pretend to care about the truth, but his cruelest lie is to convince the suffering rural heartland that he is their solution, rather than their problem.  Just how a stubborn, isolated billionaire pulled off this devastating hoax will be fodder for political scientists forever.

I believe they were desperate for someone to pay attention to them. People are paying attention now.

I feel for his many followers. They have been betrayed and abandoned by the government again and again. They would have been so much better with the elitists than they are now with President Trump.

The coal industry has not returned to Appalachia. Manufacturing has not come back to the Industrial Midwest.

In March, the wise men of politics all said President Trump was in an excellent position to win re-election.

The economy was strong, he had many millions of dollars available to spend on his campaign, he had survived impeached and the Muller inquiry, the Democrats seem stunned and overwhelmed.

Biden was struggling, and few Democrats were excited about a 79-year-old moderate from the old days surviving a talented field of local politicians and women.

It’s a different political reality today.

The pandemic has revealed Trump’s inability to manage or lead; the economy is the worst it has been in generations and is almost sure to stay that way for a while. His crippling flaws in judgment have harmed, even killed, many people.

Trump has elevated evangelical religious institutions to a position of considerable political power for the first time in the country.

Every one of the Founding Fathers feared this mixing of church and state: “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries,” wrote James Madison.

Trump has invited religious leaders to shape public and educational policy and pollute the country’s constitutional tradition of bipartisan and independent justice.

In so doing, he has also aroused millions of moderate and independent voters. They are uncomfortable with his extremism and contempt for constitutional values like a free press and congressional confirmation of government appointments.

In turns out that Trump’s most significant accomplishment was not a wall or control of the pandemic, but of creating a Tsunami of opposition that threatens to wash him away.

There has never been a coalition quite like an aroused and confident women’s movement, a new black-white movement to deal with racism, young people on social media platforms, mothers forming to curb government efforts to silence even peaceful protest.

Democratic and progressive voters, wholly excluded from consideration or participation in government for the past four years, are focused and furious. Nobody is going to keep them from voting.

On top of that, perhaps the largest group of voters who are disenchanted – even disgusted – by President Trump are Americans whose lives have been upended by the coronavirus.

No one in politics can explain why Donald Trump didn’t seize the opportunity of a political lifetime to take control of the dread pandemic and guarantee his re-election.

My only real understanding of this comes not from the media but niece Mary Trump.

In her chilling de-construction of her uncle in her new book  Donald Trump: Too Much And Never Enough, she describes a man broken by his father, glorying in his creation of anger and its destruction.

While he cannot imagine love, his passion is rage.

“He is,” she wrote, “Frankenstein without conscience.”

Our media tends to personalize politics.

Everything is a football game – he said, she said, who’s ahead today, who will be ahead tomorrow. We never get to pause long enough to grasp what is happening.

Politics is a cold, mechanical process in a diverse and divided country this size. It is never really about one thing or another.

Trump has been blocked and hindered in his threat to change the election as he has been defeated in every significant effort and issue of his political campaign:

There are the virus, racial protesters, the confederate flag and statue campaign, his war against athletes who take a knee during the national anthem, his insistence on a full house in Tulsa, his determination to be nominated in Jacksonville, his literal war on the Portland protesters, and his efforts to move the election to avoid an imminent defeat.

Trump is a master media manipulator, but if one focuses on the people and not the incestuous swamp of the White House, a very different picture emerges of his strength and skill.

Portland was a very mild example of what would follow if Trump attempted to seize power or invalidate the election. It will not happen. Millions of people will not permit it to happen, as will numerous intact elements of our civic structure.

James Madison warned that there are many more instances of the loss of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violence.

Trump is the architect of his demise,  a heckler in his own life; he is becoming a caricature of the ranter shouting in the wind, with fewer people listening all the time.

Americans have very real, not theoretical, or philosophical issues to worry about. Trump has failed them in every possible way. This is not your mother’s 2016.

“I am not worried about black people busting into my house to shoot me and my wife,” a former Trump supporter in my town told me the other day.

“I am worried about this virus killing my mother and grandmother and me and wiping out everything I have worked for all of my life. Trump has promised a million times to do nothing about that. This time, he seems to be telling the truth.”