Quote Of The Day.  President Trump and his Conservative Blitzkrieg Strike Force online and on Fox News dropped incendiary bombs on Kamala Harris all day Wednesday.

But for all the noise and thunder,  one quote from longtime Democratic Strategist Pete Giangreco caught my attention for its wisdom and balance:

“This thing is a referendum on Trump and COVID,” Giangreco told Politico. “And as long as the VP says that 10 to 20 times a day from now until November, it will all be good.”

And that’s just what she will do.  She already did.

If I were nervous about the election – I’m not, to be honest – I would print that quote out and paste it to my refrigerator or computer.

This election is ultimately about nothing else – not Black Lives Matter, not the post office, or unemployment checks, not the election, not even black women. The elephant in the room is the coronavirus and the President’s handling of it.

Another subplot is taking shape, as Harris made clear. Ambitious and “nasty” women are coming after Donald Trump. And ambitious and nasty women are watching each other’s back.

Kamala Harris’s first speech this afternoon was powerful, touching, authentic, even chilling.  She returned the fire, she dropped some powerful bombs herself.

It felt like hope reborn. Like people with hearts are here, coming to the rescue. People who seemed normal and familiar to us, even if we don’t agree with everything they say.

It was striking just how human Biden and Harris were in contrast to four years of Trumpism.

Be afraid, Mr. Trump. Biden and Harris are about to take the pandemic and shove it right up your ass. The battle for the soul of America is on.

And that’s not campaign hyperbole. It’s really true.

Those other things are all important, but they are not the reason Donald Trump is almost sure to lose the election in November.

That privilege belongs to the pandemic, the worst health crisis in America for more than a century. And to two opponents who will offer the country a genuine alternative.

Politics can be very simple or very complicated. This year in some ways it’s straightforward.

According to the CDC, 55,540 new cases of the virus were reported yesterday, for a total of  5,119,711 total cases in the United States, the highest infection total in the world.

Total deaths from the virus are 163,651, with 1,244 deaths reported yesterday. That – and President Trump’s utterly bizarre, incompetent, and dishonest response is why he is in so much trouble and why he is extremely likely to stay there.

He can’t turn back now. He can’t ever turn back.

If you’ve lost your job or your grandmother or a friend, and have no money in the bank, or food to eat, and no idea whether school is safe for your children or not, and your small business has failed, and have lost your health care, you don’t give a hoot what Kamala Harris did when she was a D.A. in San Francisco or what the Trump toadies at Fox News say about her.

For those people, it’s hard to hear their President say day after day that there is really no problem except for Democratic mayors and governors who keep trying to save people’s lives.

Being vicious isn’t the same thing as being smart.

It would have been smart for Trump to fight for a new coronavirus relief package rather than insist the virus will disappear one day. He is right, but he is now more likely to go sooner than the virus.

All the Democrats have to do is take Giancreco’s advice and let Donald Trump be Donald Trump. He seems to dig a new hole for himself each day.

Political campaigns are about optics. Picture Donald Trump and Mike Pence staying next to one another, holding their arms up to the sky for TV.

Picture Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing the same thing.

This election is very much like an earthquake,  there is a fault line, and two tectonic plates are shifting against each other, ready to alter the landscape.

The ground will shake, and some windows shatter, but when it’s over, life will go on.

One plate is fighting for a white, old, and angry America.  They don’t want to change.

The other represents the new one, nascent, chaotic,  young, colorful. It very much wants to change.

That is the earthquake that Trump has unleashed.  I don’t believe it is stoppable now.

The angry old white men are fighting to beat back a great change:  history, and time – and now nature – are not on their side.

Whiteness is not just about gender and color.

It’s a state of mind, a way of being, an attitude, a sense of entitlement: belligerence, inability to listen or change, a need to dominate and bluster, the practice of cruelty,  greed, and grievance.

They can not bring themselves to get out of the way, they can’t even imagine displacement.

The oddest thing about Trump’s defenders is that they all seem like white men to me, even the women. They are harsh and angry, there is no hope in them, only dominance.

I don’t care of Trump rolls out a vaccine next week, I believe people are sick of his lies and cruelty and incompetence. He is just too small to be President right now.

A friend chastised me today for having written that Trump is smart. He is not, she said, he’s “dumb.” No, I said he is smart. He just is ill. Dumb and crazy are not the same thing.

In a rational world with a functioning government, he would have been removed from office. He has done more than enough to demonstrate how unfit for the office he holds.

No, my friend responded, he really is stupid.

After November, we will learn if Humpty Dumpty can be put together again.

I don’t understand why it is so difficult for people who love Trump or hate him to see it is his untreated and unacknowledged mental illness that is his downfall and our pain, not disagreements with his policies or worry about his wall (okay, that really is stupid.)

Mental illnesses are common in the United States.

Nearly one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (46.6 million in 2017). Mental illnesses include many different conditions that vary in degree of severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe.

Trump has a kind of anti-social narcissism, a shrink would have to diagnosis it.

That was not my illness, but as a mentally ill person who fought to get well, I know a sick person in denial when I see one. So do many other people. The media can never really talk about it, but we crazies talk about it all the time.

Trump is without empathy and is delusional, that is obvious every time he holds a press conference or compares himself to Abraham Lincoln or asks have his orange-topped head carved on Mt. Rushmore or wants to accept his nomination on the sacred ground of Gettysburgh.

If he were healthy, that would be the very last place he would go unless he wants to put a holy light on his unfitness for office. Since he is always great, there is no pandemic to deal with.

That is the behavior of a leader who is ill, not one who is smart.

It’s fair to wring our hands about the damage he has done; it’s wise and mature – for the future, if nothing else – to understand how it has happened.

Trump has become obsessed with lying now, about his actions, about magic pills to cure the virus, about the very significant and already occurring dangers to children in school.

It isn’t just that he lies; it’s that he can’t tell the truth.  Since that makes no sense politically anymore, it must be about something else.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think he knows what truth is any longer. Unchecked dishonestly becomes a habit, like alcohol or drugs.

Our President can lie all he wants about his bankruptcies and incredible successes in life; he can’t lie about those things.

We see them and feel them and bleed them every day. This is a nation in pain, led by a person who can no longer feel any – in himself or anyone else.

I am grateful for my mental illness; it forced me to try and become a human being. We get to recover every day.

If I didn’t get help, I would have remained a delusional and insensitive man, hurting people and myself everywhere I went. Whenever I look at Trump speaking, I give thanks that I am not Trump. What a hard place to be.

Avoiding help was not acceptable for me, but it took nearly 30 years of therapy to get there. The real lesson of the Trump experience for me is that there is real help for the mentally ill. And it helps.

We hide from it and ignore it at our peril, as we have been learning.

Speaking on Gettysburgh’s hallow grounds and invoking the genius and eloquence of our greatest President, Trump would shoot himself in the foot yet again, he will shrink himself to the size of an ant.

This, I suspect, is why it won’t happen, like so much of what he promises.

Americans have mostly made up their minds about Trump, one way or another. It is difficult to imagine those numbers changing substantially in such a divided country.

I have learned to be focused and fact-driven. I remind myself to stay out of the daily scrum. I am a  rationalist, I believe in truth and justice and compassion. They do always win in the end.

The choice of Kamala Harris as a running mate looks to be a good move the morning after. The decision will fire up black women and soothe the moderates and independents who extremes and will ultimately determine the outcome of the election.

A former prosecutor, she sees the country as the jury, and she knows how to make her case.

Biden and Harris are about the center, not the edges. I think the country is hungry for that right now. Their introductions last night seemed intimate, comfortable, more appealing to me that a huge hall with people screaming.

The campaign is on.

The Republican’s best and only shot of winning is to make Harris the real and future President since their attacks are skimming off Biden. They will present Harris as an arrogant and “nasty” woman, a She Witch of the left.  This odd strategy as Trump seeks the votes of suburban women.

His illness prevents him from seeing how much so many women fear and dislike him, he doesn’t believe that could be true.

This isn’t 2016.

Even people who like Trump knows he lies and makes things up and distorts everything else.  An avid Trump supporter in my town told me he no longer lets his children watch any of the President’s press briefings. “I don’t want them to learn how to lie,” he said.

It’s a remarkable thing – and a powerful and disturbing symptom of mental illness – when someone can’t stop lying even when telling the truth is simpler, safer, and smarter.

To win this election, anyone would need a few more tools than that. He has no strategy for winning, only being.

Will he ever regret his choices? He can’t.

This man could be a hero for the ages if he had confronted the virus the way Andrew Cuomo did, and he chose instead to be America’s First Fool. And one of our worst catastrophes.

There are plenty of conspiracy theories around. One that I happen to love and may even embrace is skimming around the Internet.

It says that the pandemic is really Mother Earth herself punishing Trump and the Republicans for denying the existence of climate change. She is punishing him. Whenever he says it is gone, she just brings it somewhere else, she makes a liar out of him every day.

A college professor sent me that one, quoting the mystical Hebrew Kabbalah and God’s warning to humans that if they didn’t respect the Earth, he would abandon them to its vengeance.

It kind of works for me.

I understand that many of the people reading this are losing sleep worrying about whether Donald Trump could lose the 2020 presidential election. I hope I always have empathy for anyone who is broken.

I don’t get to hate somebody just because I don’t like them.

I know what it feels like to be crazy and to be hated for it. I can’t just put that aside. Nobody gets off easy; nobody could ever be harder on me that I was and am on myself.

The 2016 election was traumatic for many people, and any suggestion from anywhere that Trump might win is a trigger, just like gunshot wounds for Iraqi war vets.

Sure, Biden can blow it, he’s done it before.

But this isn’t the past, this is the present, and the stakes are high. His campaign so far has been smart and successful. He need not do much more than not step in his own shit.

Intellectually, most people understand that no one can say with absolute certainty that Trump will lose the re-election with several months to go, people who say they can are selling magical elixirs out of carnival jugs.

The people how reading my blog have been kind to me, and as a gift, I will recommend that they go to the 528 Presidential Election Forecast and bookmark it.

It is the best and most reliable political forecast anywhere, at least in my view. They do everything mass media no longer does – they inform with information, truth, and diligence. They don’t confuse shouting and screaming with reality.

They have worked hard on their polling, and they were pretty close in 2016. I trust them to prepare me for what is to come.

538 says Donald Trump has a 30 percent chance of winning in November.

The site also says Joe Biden has a 71 percent chance of winning.

Yes, that could change.

But I want to give something back to people who have trusted me and share the 528 2020 Presidential Forecast, out just one day after Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, and the campaign enters its final phase.

If you need to know where we are, they will tell you.

Like Churchill, all anybody can promise is more blood, toil, and tears, at least for a while. The faint of heart, the summer soldiers, must look in the mirror and ask themselves what, if anything, is better than fear and doubt and gloom.

I don’t tell other people what to do, but my answer to myself was simple: do something.