A dread virus has killed at least 150,000 of our people, wrecked our economy,  disrupted millions of lives, and saved our democracy along the way.

It’s not the script for an Avenger movie. It’s our lives in 2020.

Be careful when you complain about Covoid-19 too loudly. It just might be listening. Life is full of crises and mystery.

Shame on the media and traumatized Democrats and liberals for spreading panic about Donald Trump’s delusions and intentions. The Apocalypse is not interested in us. It’s not our time, despite all the bad news.

Donald Trump is not planning or going to take over the government.

Or cancel our election.

He has never succeeded or even attempted to do anything like that in his life. Below, I’ve offered 10 things (and one bonus reason) that show why President Trump has quit running an actual re-election campaign and is instead preparing to lose.

He doesn’t want or need to win, and that is the key to understanding what is happening right now. So is his past.

In 2019, the gross gaming revenues of casinos in the United States, by state, were approximately 43.61 billion dollars.

Donald Trump owned four casinos in his previous life; every single one of them went bankrupt in rapid succession.

He was bailed out by his father Fred and bankers desperate to recoup their losses.  His father is no longer alive, and he no longer needs the banks to maintain his lifestyle.

The government takes care of all of it. We pay for it.

Trump did not apologize or admit any mistakes. He hired a good writer and published a book about how successful and savvy a businessman he was.

Here is what I believe he is really doing: he is going bankrupt once more in a different context.

He is setting the stage to claim the election was rigged, to keep his followers from thinking he is a loser, and to plant the seeds of his next chapter, which will be wreaking havoc and division and being provocative and arguing for white nationalism on his new reality show – How The Liberals And Fake Media and Deep State Screwed Us.

Just as it was becoming clear that he will lose, Trump and his media partners decided to dance again, as they do almost daily.

They just whipped up a new panic scenario this week – he won’t leave the office and will try and seize the government. People took the bate and flipped out.

Democrats do outrage well too. And hysteria brings volunteers and money. The Greeks who invented democracy as a noble profession would be crying in their robes.

Next January,  rest assured that Donald Trump will not be meeting with government officials to work on the incredible mess he will have left behind. He will be playing golf every single day at Ma-A-Largo and broadcasting on his new We’ve-Been-Screwed-Again radio network.

Trump is the first Dystopian President to occupy the White House. And oddly enough he has a Dystopian Media to accompany him.

There is a lot of money in gloom and fear.

President Trump can make tons of trouble without having to do any of the real work, sort of what he’s doing right now in the White House without reading much. (But here’s the secret: he doesn’t need the White House to do what he loves.)

In keeping with my own distinctly non-Dystopian point of view, I offer my readers a list of ten ways you can follow President Trump yourself and consider the idea that he has quit on the re-election.

Don’t take my word for it. Make up your minds. As difficult as things are, this man is no Hitler. Here are my 10 things that explain why he has quit.

1. A strong economy was the centerpiece of his re-election campaign, and his only actual achievement, for better or worse.

Since the pandemic, he has not attended or called one single meeting on economic recovery.

Nor has he devoted a single talk to the nation or press conference about a recovery. That has confounded even his closest advisers.

If he wanted to be re-elected, he would have done that a hundred times by now. Instead, no czar, no plan, no council, no White House emergency sessions, no address-the-nation speeches.

He won’t even concede the virus is real, or that the economy won’t rebound soon.

He can’t bring himself to do it, and there are only two plausible reasons: he doesn’t want to run for a second term, and no matter what, he cannot admit a mistake. That is his disorder and his somewhat tragic failure, the flaw in all Greek Tragedy.

2. Off-camera, White House aides say he longer attends coronavirus planning sessions at all. Controlling the pandemic is his absolute necessity if he wishes to be re-elected. He simply insists it will somehow get better.

A President who wants to get re-elected would move heaven and earth to get the pandemic behind us so that the kids could go back to school safely and the economy recover.

Rather than talk bout how slight a problem it is, he would talk every day about what a serious problem it is and what the federal government is going to do about it.

The reason there is a federal government at all, according to Thomas Jefferson, is that there would be some problems and crisis  – war, plagues, economic issues – that were too big for the states to handle alone. When that happened, the federal government would offer support.

3. The President is not well, physically, or mentally. It might be 74-year-old stuff, or it might be worse.

Every reporter in Washington knows there is something wrong with him, and I can see it in the puffiness of his face, and his disjointed, rambling and often incoherent ramblings at rallies and White House press conferences.

I’ve heard the most common theories, but as they have not been confirmed by anyone, I don’t feel comfortable talking about them here.

We know he was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center in November with a doctor sitting next to him all the way. They’ve never said why.

And let’s face it. We all know people who brag about how smart they are and how strong their cognitive skills. We also know those smart people rarely, if ever, need to brag about how smart they are.

It’s not smart.

But we don’t need a doctor to confirm what we see with our own eyes at West Point and in his unhinged press conferences. He’s not healthy.

4. Why is he dismantling the U.S. Post Office just months before a presidential election? Recently, a campaign donor to Trump’s Presidential Election with no government experience was appointed to take over the troubled U.S. Post Office.

The first thing Louis DeJoy did was to announce draconian changes to deliberately slow down mail delivery at a time when mail-in and absentee ballots are critical to the election during a pandemic?

Why would he do this?

Conventional wisdom has it that Trump wants to further gum up the November election. And DeJoy is a fierce Trump loyalist who will do whatever he is asked to do.

The answer to why is relatively simple, and smaller than one might think.

Trump has long hated and feuded with Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, one of Trump’s most hated newspapers. He has sought to take all of his federal contracts away.

Trump has been looking to punish Bezos for several years now. As is apparent, his enemies become his obsessions; he lets nothing go.

His friends say of him, “he never keeps a friend or loses an enemy.”

Amazon has gazillion-dollar contracts with the U.S.P.S., one of the few bright spots in their struggling operation.

Trump has tweeted about this a score of times; he wants the contracts canceled, just like the multi-billion cloud contract Amazon had in hand at the Pentagon when Trump ordered it scrapped. And he seems to hate the post office.

You might remember that Trump tried to stop the sale of Warner Brothers and CNN to AT&T because he was angry at CNN for its reporting about him.

Mary Trump reminds us that one can’t underestimate her uncle’s pettiness and lust for vengeance. If he can’t get to Bezos one way, he’ll try another, even if it threatens Republican candidates almost as much as Democrats.

He will also endanger the operations of many small businesses and lots of elderly people who still get their Social Security checks in the mail and depend on it.

This is not someone who is looking to win over voters.

5. Weekends playing golf. During the height of the pandemic trauma, when 1,000 Americans a day were dying, Trump went golfing every single weekend at his New Jersey or Virginia golf courses.

According to Trump Golf Count, the President has played golf 268 times since his inauguration, at a cost to taxpayers of 138 million dollars in travel and security costs.

Democrats are already making use of these weekly escapes from Washington, why would he not care about those photos showing him playing golf while so many people are dying.

It’s not fair to blame him for that, but somebody who wanted to win an election would spend a few weekends talking to some of the many millions of suffers out there. It’s called empathy.

6. Fighting for the confederacy. What possible gain could Trump get by fighting his hopeless battle to conserve confederate relics, flags, and statues?

Politically, none.  Even Mississippi took it’s confederate state flag down and replaced it.

There is this inexplicable thread that runs through his losing positions, that are not, in his world, losing positions. He’s prepping himself to lose while making sure he gets none of the blame.

That way, he will always be a winner.

He is solidifying ties to his famous “base,” proving to them that he remains faithful and will pursue even hopeless causes  – like the country is being overrun by do-gooders and anarchists.

He doesn’t need this conflict in a national election. Like most of the things he is doing, it makes no political sense – unless he is getting ready to leave and is just keeping his following loyal and intact and eager.

People who love confederate statues and fly confederate flags are not going to vote for Joe Biden. Trump has a lock on this small but intense group of people. So why fight so hard for the statutes?

He needs this if he wishes to continue his role as the Great Disruptor and shadow guru to white nationalists after the election, those “good people” in Charlotte, Va.

What he is really saying to these people is, “I’ve stuck with you when nobody else would, you have to stick with me. I was loyal to you, you have to be loyal to me.” Wherever he goes, and if he goes anywhere, they will follow him.

Trump is leaving his Presidency with almost no single significant social group beyond the same base he started with. Without them, he will just be a real estate hustler again.

He is making sure they will all come. And they will come.

7. Taking A Knee. The N.F.L., the N.B.A., NASCAR, even Coca-Cola have all said they would support their players in protesting police brutality and supporting Black Lives Matter and social justice.

Baseball, baseball, and soccer players are doing it all over the country.

He lost yet another culture-war issue. Why keep fighting and highlighting his losses?

He’s lost the mainstream on that issue. He won’t gain a single vote by it.

What has Trump got to lose by alienating every single black person in America? Even the handful he might otherwise have picked up could prove valuable in a tight race? He has nothing to gain, unless he’s putting a Trumpian sheen on the loss he knows is coming.

8. Disrupting the election. Donald Trump can’t move the election or overturn it.  He has no authority to do, and even his Republican supporters have said they won’t go along with it.

It is certainly possible for him to raise doubts about its validity. That’s what he’s doing, building the case for a rigged the election, not a takeover of the government.

Nothing will arouse more opponents to do more and contribute more and vote more than his threatening disrupt our political process if he loses.

Trump’s election ranting makes sense only if he wishes to be able to say he didn’t really lose when he leaves office.

He can say to all those supporters he has been speaking to with his recent bizarre conflicts and decisions that he didn’t really lose and he should.  The election was a mess, and he should have won.

I think of Trump when I remember the wonderful scene in Lethal Weapon when Leo Getz (Joe Pesci) and Lee Butters (Chris Rock), rant about their problems with mobile phone service.

“They fuck you, they fuck you, they fuck you!,” Pesci shouts at Getz. That is the core ideology Donald Trump shares with his disconnected army of anger and resentment.

That is his message to them now, about them, about him. That is not the message of a man trying to win over people to his cause.

As Mary Trump wrote in her book Donald Trump: Too Much And Never Enough, Trump can’t bear to lose. He has an almost psychotic response to it, she says.

He fears it above all other things, almost as much as he fears taking responsibility for his mistakes.

He is thinking way beyond November, as a businessman would, but not a politician. If he thinks he is going to lose, he will do almost anything – or maybe anything – to try to avoid it.

In this way, he will leave office as an aggrieved and mistreated warrior who never let his troops down, not even once.  And who was never really defeated. Perhaps they would all like to come along and watch his new TV network, “They fucked us, they fucked us, they fucked us again,” live from a yacht floating around Mar-A-Largo.

9. The War On Dr. Fauci. Anthony Fauci is perhaps the most loved and respected doctor on the planet. He has devoted a long and glorious career to s studying – and in some cases like AIDS – helping to cure and control them.

He is considered the foremost authority on infectious diseases in the world. Why would Trump jettison this much loved and respected man at such a fraught time?

When polls show the pandemic is causing Trump to shed millions of followers and radically threaten his re-election, it would seem reasonable to lean on this person, put him in charge of fighting the pandemic and then reap all of the praise for controlling it, as Andrew Cuomo did so skillfully at the height of the Covid-19’s ravaging of New York City.

All across the country, people overwhelmingly support the governors and mayors who responded aggressively to the coronavirus outbreak. Why wouldn’t Trump keep Dr. Fauci close to him at such a bad time?

Most health experts say we would be past the worst of the pandemic by now if we had followed Fauci’s instructions.

You may have noticed when Trump’s supporters have a very disciplined philosophy when Trump is criticized. They never defend him or the odd things he says, they simply attack the critics. They call it “owning libs.”

So for weeks now, Trump and his followers have been attacking Fauci, who now gets to many death threats he needs a security detail.

When Trump was so savagely criticized for suggesting Chlorox as a possible cure for the virus, he withdrew from daily press conferences on the virus. Trump was caught orchestrating a campaign against Fauci using his subordinates and allies.

Monday, Trump attacked his surviving health counsel or Dr. Deborah Birx in a tweet after she warned the pandemic is “extraordinarily widespread” in the United States.

Why would he deny something that any of us can see for ourselves on a map when he is increasingly unpopular for his denials about the seriousness of the virus.

Dr. Fauci kept disagreeing with Trump’s rosy view of the pandemic. You only get to disagree once with this President.

As a civil servant, Trump couldn’t fire Dr. Fauci as he otherwise would almost certainly have done. But he may yet find a day.

10. Banning the press from the Republican National Convention.

You can take it to the bank.  The press will be permitted to come and cover the Republican National Convention in North Carolina.

Trump is desperate to distract attention from the pandemic, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it. He has lots of time since he’s paying no attention to the pandemic at all.

And why wouldn’t he want the press around if he were planning a fierce and determined campaign to win another four years as President. It only makes sense if he doesn’t care.

His core followers hate the media, per his instructions. They will follow him wherever he goes, and he has long bypassed the press and communicates directly with his followers.

That’s fine for a Reality T.V. President, but it wouldn’t work for any kind of politician trying to win a potentially tight election.

There is nothing the media likes to write about more than the media. That is a great way to distract them from what’s important.

One could make a pretty good case for scrapping presidential debates and nominating conventions since neither has much meaning anymore.

The debates are not debates, and the conventions are not really conventions, but coronations. Political parties to not give up that kind of attention for no good reason. And who will Trump get his listeners, however many there are, to boo?

Then there is number eleven, the bonus: Portland. It is clear now that Trump never intended to “dominate” Portland or other cities run by Democrats. Again, he is speaking to a narrow cohort of loyal supporters. Many live in rural areas, where there are great fear and suspicion of cities.

Many of his followers buy the idea as presented on Fox News and other conservative media that “Antifa’ or various communists or socialists or black terrorists are just waiting to rampage through their communities.

They don’t know that the trouble in Portland was confined to six blocks in all and that most of the city was quite peaceful.

In Trump’s bubble world, Portland was a great victory for the President. It seemed like another disaster – think of Tulsa – to me.

I wrote that it was another disaster and embarrassment, and for most of the country, it was.

A true fascist like Hitler or Mussolini would have come into Portland shot every protester insight and thrown the others in jail. Trump has no stomach for real fascism, he wouldn’t last a minute himself. He just wants to be loved, and anyone who doesn’t love him is an enemy.

He wants only to be the Big Ca-Ca.

When the moms showed up, Trump’s plan fell apart and the invasion was ended. If it wasn’t so dangerous and clumsy, it would have been funny. The moms and a sex worker named “Naked Athena” shamed them. They fled.

Once again, Trump is speaking only to his core supporters who he has encouraged to refuse masks,  fought for confederate statues, described the virus as a Democratic hoax,  and bring Ak-47’s to statehouse protests about governments having to shelter town, wear masks, and shutter businesses.

They will follow the President into exile and wander in search of the Promised Land. That is the only way his shocking declarations and miserable campaign makes sense.

I think the honest and most realistic way to look at what is happening now is that we are in the final spasms of the Trump Presidency, if not  Trumpism itself.

It is, of course, not going to be pretty, easy, or uplifting. This is the greasy side of democracy, the sausage-making. It’s not a perfect process, as they say, just better than any alternative.

From Tulsa to Jacksonville, none of these moves by the President make any sense as a candidate. I couldn’t say in all honesty that he is even running for re-election.

He seems trapped in a Trumpian, delusional space, he is almost dreamy these days as complaints like a kid home from middle school that nobody likes him anymore. He seems wistful, bewildered that he couldn’t just will the pandemic away.

Every day some outrageous idea or tweet comes out the media jumps, the panelists and talking heads fume and sputter, and we move on to the next outrage, the new headline, and segment.

Has the fabled Deep State ever had more fun or been more relevant? Lost in all the dust are those embattled working people who believe every word he has ever spoken, even as he gets ready to jump shit and leave them stranded again.

There comes a time in the life of every arrogant and protected rich kid, wrote Gabriel Garcia Marquez in one of his novels, when the clock just runs out and the real world comes up and slaps him in the face.

Trump reminds me of that rich kid, whose dad isn’t around anymore to bail him out. Maybe in his head, he just can’t bear to tell anyone that he failed. Maybe Fred Sr. lives on in his head like Mary Trump says.

I can’t even imagine why he thinks any of this would get him re-elected, so I’m doing what Sherlock Holmes would do, I’m doing with the probable, since the impossible doesn’t work for me.

The Donald Trump we’re seeing now only makes sense if he knows he is going to lose and is laying the groundwork for his flight and reemergence. He won’t be quiet for long, only death will shut him up.

He can get on his chopper and show up in the cold January in Mar-A-Largo straight from the White House and start disrupting and tweeting from Florida, his new home, without skipping a beat.

He can just take those 80 million Twitter followers along with him.

Twice in recent weeks, Trump has told reporters that “nobody likes me,” in a tone of self-pity and bewilderment as a child would say coming home in tears from a schoolyard beating.

In the White House, I see a man dying of a thousand cuts, reeling like a Bull stuck by bullfighters. I think he sees a way out and has found a way to take it and save face at the same time. He can’t handle losing.

He is disturbing, but he is not nearly as fearsome and dangerous as we have come to see him, and that is our problem and our own shortcoming. We have lost perspective.

It might be wise to take him a little bit less at his work and a bit less seriously.

This is a man who feeds on attention, and once ignored, will fizzle and flatten like a balloon.

What we all need is for all the people who worry about him to go out and do something and remove him from office, and stop freaking out every time he opens his mouth and says something stupid or senseless.

He will do the rest.

The very last thing this man wants is to be President again.