People are asking in 2020 what Ronald Reagan urged them to ask in 1980: it is considered the greatest campaign question of all time: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

How many people do you know who will say yes? That’s the same question that is at the heart of the 2020 Presidential election.

I’m off for a one-night birthday celebration in a room in a Vermont Inn that the movie star Paul Newman loved when he stayed there.  Maria and I had a one-night honeymoon there.

Ulysses Grant slept in the next room, and so did Daniel Webster.  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s favorite room was just down the hall. It’s a good place to ponder politics (or not).

I thought I’d just explain this frantic moment in politics briefly before I left. This is the problem with ego; you think you are needed.

The presidential election has entered a new and semi-final phase, one that is perhaps the tensest and most unsettling, but which is still unlikely to alter the outcome.

Trump is the wolf caught in the trap now, he’s chewing his own leg off to get out of it, or anybody else’s.

Every day, we have a President who sets out to tear the country apart a little more each day so that he can, one way or another, not have to lead it.

The center is holding.

I’ll do my best, but if you want to know what’s happening, buy Mary Trump’s new book. She nailed it.  This is the story of a little man trapped in a very big place.

President Trump has made it clear he will do anything to win re-election except one essential thing –  work hard to convince moderate, undecided, and Democratic voters to vote for him. His primary weapon is talking, not organization.

He clearly has no appetite for the frustrating and gritty work of leadership – stopping the pandemic, listening to African-Americans, growing his base, actually working to restore the economy.

Trump believes in his own greatness and his own destiny. He makes his own truth and stays within it.

He smells danger but can’t believe in it for long. In his mind, he will be saved. He has always been saved.

I think the new plan is just to freak everybody out until they melt or flee or give up.

In America, the leader of the world’s most powerful country, a President can make his own truth.

There are lots of people who believe whatever a President says. And there are a lot of people who don’t. It makes for a schizophrenic country.

And right now, the real leader of our nation is a pandemic virus, which tells its own truth, and has Donald Trump powerless and at its mercy.

It’s important to understand that all of these controversies and distractions from the President are contrived, not genuine. He is not preparing to win; he is preparing to lose.

He does not believe the post office should be shut down; he does not think there is runaway mail fraud, he does not think the election should be move, he does not believe the pandemic is a minor distraction, about to go away.

He, of all people, knows better.

This bizarre duality is confusing. Most successful autocrats believe in their own cause. Trump really doesn’t have a cause beyond been praised as great and loved. His tragedy is that he can never be loved enough.

This is a broken man who just can’t bear to lose, mostly because no one ever let him. A good thing for parents to study if they have any nerves left in November.

When military planes detect radar closing in on their positions, they release metal strips sometimes called chaff, paper, and aluminum and other material shot into the air to fool the radar and send missiles off course.

This is Trump’s strategy for survival.

He tosses off so much chaff every single day that nobody can even remember what the truth is for long. He fights so many battles on so many fronts that nobody can focus on any of them long enough.

One thing he has done is to stun the Republican party like a python stuns a rabbit with venom, he has thrown all of the normal checks and balances off balance.

He makes it easy on his supporters: every bad or critical thing anyone says about him anywhere in the world is fake. He can do no wrong, make no mistakes, knows everything. He can only be wronged.

He is a comfortable leader to follow or not to follow, depending on who you are and how you think.

To follow him, it’s best not to think at all. To stop him, thinking, rather than quivering, is necessary.

Yes, his contempt for democratic values is upsetting, but that doesn’t mean it is working. There’s the tricky thing about lies. If you overdo it, they stop working and work against you.

As of now, he is far behind and slipping. I live in the present, not the future. I see an awakening of democracy, not it’s demise.

I also see the rise of an aroused, determined,  more compassionate, and just America. Trump can only think on one track. The Army he has raised against himself think on many.

And thanks mostly to our economy-killing pandemic, and the great sacrifice made by George Floyd, and the millions of people who cherish our democracy, I see no way he can win now.

You may not choose or dare to believe it, that is your choice.

That is the bottom line for today, for all the sturm and drang and hysteria.

The President is not campaigning on his policies or plans or battling for victory. He’s campaigning on trying to destroy an election he can’t win.

It’s true, he might take a good chunk of the country with him when he falls, but it’s a big country, and he can’t get all of it. Nobody said freedom was easy.

Donald Trump is original in that he working almost exclusively on the perimeter of the election – paralyzing the post office, creating suspicion about voting fraud, fighting for confederate statues, invading Portland, and keeping his loyal base- and his growing enemies list –  in a state of arousal and outrage.

He won’t be facing real reporters anymore; they are suddenly on to him and seem less inclined to let those lies slide. Everywhere he goes, he is being called out for lying and evasion.

Wishful thinking is a disorder, not a strategy for victory.

In a sense, he is avoiding a traditional campaign altogether, hoping instead to discredit it so wholly that the pandemic will be simply be survived by many and forgotten – it is what it is.

After that, the economy will re-open over the dead bodies of lots of black and brown and old people. And it will leave anger and grievance and pain it its wake. There is no lying away that.

People are asking what Ronald Reagan asked them to ask in 1980: it is considered the greatest campaign question of all time: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

How many people in America beyond the one percent can answer yes to that?

Then, his millions of smitten followers will push him to glory. That’s the plan, for today at least.

His one effort to reach beyond his base – interviews with Chris Wallace of Fox News and Jonathan Swan of HBO’s Axios, were disastrous for him. He has already returned to the cozy confines of Fox And Friends, where he promptly declared that children couldn’t catch the coronavirus.

Trump’s overall strategy, as chaotic as it is,  is taking shape now.

Rather than attack the pandemic itself, which is complicated and costly and the greatest obstacle to his re-election, he is going after the people who take it seriously.

That includes Dr. Fauci and the doctors and health specialists from the CDC, along with Democratic Governors and mayors who have been urging a greater response.

Trump’s response to trouble is consistent – he starts dropping distraction grenades on the eager reporters around him – they never tire of distraction grenades, they make for great ratings – lies wantonly and without shame and personally attacks anyone person, place, state, or thing that challenges his narrative or presents a new and different one.

Because no one has ever done this in a presidential election before, journalists and opponents are still scrambling to figure out how to deal with it. There are so many of these grenades, some of them stick, and few people in our country have long memories or attention spans.

The post office assault is a perfect example of how far Trump will go to try to win, or at least to discredit and hobble the election if he loses.

He is setting himself up to be able to tell his followers that the election was fraudulent. If the election is close, he might even try to get the Supreme Court to bail him out as they did George Bush when he ran against Al Gore.

In a divided country, all elections are close. The more muddled and chaotic, the bigger target.

It’s a long shot, but it’s a shot. Right now, it’s his only shot.

It’s important to remember that Trump doesn’t care about mail fraud any more than he cares about the pandemic or Dr. Fauci or postal workers or old ladies getting their social security checks or the safety of teachers and students.

He doesn’t work that way. It’s not about what he feels or what is right. It’s about how it looks.

What he cares about it is a last-ditch effort to save his re-election and remove any obstacle to it – like Dr. Fauci. Or closed schools. Our laws requiring masks.  Or shutdowns of any kind.

Or failing that, to somehow come out a winner, even in defeat. He knows how to do that, he’s done it all of his life.

What makes Dr. Fauci threatening for Trump is that he is so widely trusted and respected. CEO’s and Wall Street investors listen to him; he is much more credible than the President.

Trump is especially jealous of Dr. Fauci. He is everything he isn’t and can’t be.

He’s experienced, much loved, accomplished, respected. He hasn’t risen on bullshit and lies but on honesty, good faith, and hard work. He is the very biological opposite of the President, a reminder of what Donald Trump is not. Of course, he hates him.

And imagine how Trump himself must feel, so much of his life is a lie, I shudder to think of trying to keep track of all those lies.

Dr. Fauci is the leading infectious disease expert in the world, he gets invited to throw out the first baseball of the season, and he is trusted, something our President has never managed to be until he ran for President and surprised the world by drawing so many unsuspecting and devoted followers.

But what he doesn’t have is what Dr. Fauci has in spades – legitimacy.

Donald Trump is unfit to be President and is in miles over his head. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this, he has none of the best people around to help him navigate.

Some people don’t see his illegitimacy, others forget it, but Trump never forgets it. It shows up in every interview, tweet, and increasingly desperate press conference.

He is a frightened little man trapped in a Presidents’s body. People don’t like me.

When I fell apart, I remember telling a therapist that I felt like a five-year-old boy with a book contract and a 90-acre farm with dogs, sheep, and goats.

That’s what Mary Trump says her uncle feels like (times 1,000), and that’s what I know he feels like. You can only love him with blinders on.,

It’s one of the great ironies of Trump is that he has nothing but contempt for the people who love him the most. None of the people in those MAGA hats could get near Mar-A-Largo or set foot on those fancy golf courses.

Almost everything he does screws and betrays them.

The people whose approval he most seeks and has always wrought  – the intellectuals, academics, the anchors, reporters, the socialites, the pundits despise him.

And he has to despise them as well to avoid looking human and needy and insecure. I sometimes think every single thing he does is all about payback, about giving the finger to the swells and snoots who were entertained by him but refused ever to take him seriously.

They are taking him seriously now.

Trump’s troll Army – his bands of  Twitter-based white nationalists, angry white working-class supporters, and gun lovers are known for going after his critics or perceived enemies – they call it doxing.

This ranges from Robo death treats to the Internet-based practice of researching and publicly broadcasting private or identifying information about an individual or organization.

When Trump criticizes someone or tweets unkindly about them, they will be instantly targeted by what people call his Troll Army. He doesn’t ever need to ask, he just tweets once or twice.

Dr. Fauci, his wife, and three daughters have all been “doxed” and had their lives threatened to the point that he requested and received a security detail comprised of U.S. Marshall’s.

Trump has his online goon squad, and they know what they are supposed to do. In our time, there are all kinds of ways to frighten and intimidate people without coming near them.

They are the ones who listen for dog whistles.

Trump would like Dr. Fauci to resign or just to shut up; he is a significant obstacle in the way of the President’s campaign to convince the American public that the threat from the virus is small or exaggerated, mostly by Democrats.

They are dishonest and corrupt, they just want to harm his re-election campaign. I’ve met people who believe the entire pandemic is an invention of Nancy Pelosi.

Trump has always gotten people to believe his lies; there are hundreds if not millions of Americans who now believe the virus was a hoax, and it will go away momentarily.

Okay, so why attack the post office? A primer, it’s becoming imperative.

The U.S. Postal service, like most American businesses, is suffering from sharply declining demand due to coronavirus crisis. Congress has been officially informed it will run out of funds in September without federal assistance.

When Congress created the postal service, it was never expected to be profitable, but an essential and dependable structure of communication within the new union.

Donald Trump is hostile to the idea of a postal bailout. Ideological conservatives have long argued for the privatization of mail; they don’t like big government (except for Homeland Security crisis teams).

The President has also complained repeatedly about what he calls a “sweetheart” deal on Amazon shipping.

Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, also owns the Washington Post, which is critical of the President and which he has targeted as a source of “fake news.”

Trump is believed to have blocked a multi-dollar Pentagon contract Amazon was expected to receive as a punishment to Bezos and the Post.

Two things have intensified the controversy over the future of the post office, which has also seen declines in first-class mail delivery due to the Internet and the rise of e-mail and texting.

One is the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a friend and major donor to the Trump campaign and an arch-conservative, as Postmaster General. He immediately announced “major operational changes” to the USPS that workers say will slow down the mail delivery.

This curtailing of postal service would come just weeks before the presidential election. Trump, critics say, wants to make mail delivery slower and less reliable so that the election will be further tarnished.

Many states are switching to mail-in balloting – just like Absentee Voting. Trump seems to dislike any idea that will make it easier for people to vote.

The hidden agenda behind this is race.

African-Americans and Latinos are believed to get discouraged from voting of rules and procedures change. Voter suppression of minorities has once again become a huge political issue in states led by Republican governors and legislatures.

The fewer blacks and Latinos and poor people vote – those are the ones easiest to disqualify from voting – the better the odds in a close race.

In the 2016 Georgia governor’s race, more than 40,000 African Americans were disqualified because of new ID requirements and the closing of hundreds of poll stations in minority neighbors.

Stacy Abrams, an African-American lawyer who ran for governor, says she might have won the race of those votes had been counted. A total of 55,000 votes defeated her.

If mail-in ballots can’t be sorted and delivered quickly and efficiently by the postal service, there will be all sorts of legal and other challenges and delays. It might take weeks before all the votes are tallied.

This would reinforce Trump’s inevitable claim that the election was somehow rigged (even though he seems to be the Chief Rigger), and if it got to court, perhaps he could find some friendly judges.

Again, a long shot, but a chance.

The tricky thing to discern about Trump is that he doesn’t seem to have any sincere ideological or other opinions about the things he attacks or challenges. He is profoundly transactional. His core value appears to be that he comes first, in all things, a reliable symptom of narcissism.

He lives in a series of concentric bubbles; the first is his; the second is the people immediately around him; the third is the biggest bubble of all, the people who live in tweet and media land with him.

Extreme conservatives seem to be the ultimate source and inspiration for almost all of his policies. He does what they – and Evangelical Christians – want him to do every time.

He is also unrelentingly vengeful.

So in going after the post office, he pleases some conservatives, makes a mail-in election more difficult, threatens Bezos’s deal with the USPS, and continues to prepare himself and his followers with an excuse for the bruising defeat he is expected to take.

Just another grievance at the hands of the leftists and Democrats.

It may seem insane to his detractors, but it makes perfect sense to his followers. We all live in bubbles in one sense – what, after all, is the left and the right? – , some are just bigger and more isolated than others

If you live in Trump’s world, everything is going to plan. If you live in a world of science, data, and common sense, the world has gone mad.

That is the source of the great schism tearing at the country.

I can’t tell other people what to think. I am committed only to saying what I think.

This is going to be a messy few months, full of provocation, disruption, and lies. The Trump campaign has become the toilet bowl of American politics.

You can’t argue with it or reason with it. All you can do is flush.