The emergency shrouding the election is not whether or not President Trump can invalidate the election and take over the country. He can’t and won’t.

He can make an awful mess of things, but he can’t ride the horses of the apocalypse. He couldn’t even get into the carriage.

The frightening thing for me is not that he will harm me, but that the President of the United States is breaking down before our eyes, engaging in behavior that is almost schizophrenic.

The authors of the Constitution never imagined a President who was mentally ill and power-mad at the same time. No one was prepared for it.

The U.S. Postal Service was founded at the start of our country and has a rich and ongoing history of bringing us together and allowing us to connect with each other and anchoring our communities, no matter the obstacles and the odds.

Post offices are very often the deep roots of the community, from their post office boxes to their bulletin boards. More kids found their first jobs and more people their handymen on these bulletin boards than anywhere else in America.

Those obstacles to the post officed were always believed to come from without, like snow and rain,  not from within or above.

We are selfish people, we elitists and so-called “progressives,” we freak out daily about how dangerous he is, and how destructive.

But as usual, we are not the people who he is hurting or will hurt the most. We have all kinds of ways to fight and all sorts of resources and options.

My 88-year-old neighbor, who walks or catches a ride to the post office every morning to make her world work, get money to live, and get letters from her grandchildren, has none.

Neither do the poor and the vulnerable.

And neither does the disabled veteran, whose prescription medicines are mailed to him at the post office every week, and whose life, and often sanity, depends on them getting there on time.

Amidst the furor and angst, it is essential to note that Donald Trump, who thinks he is fighting to win the November election, has handed the Democrats a campaign gift almost as powerful as the pandemic itself.

I think it’s fair to see that Donald Trump’s assault on the U.S. Post Office is perhaps his most brazen yet on our democracy and our elections.

It is also an assault on our precious but endangered sense of community.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that the most daring thing young people can do is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of isolation and loneliness can be cured.

The post office is a lonely standout against the digitalizing of our world and its growing dehumanization.

Here, we see the people who make up our community, talk to them, know them as human beings, not just messages on Facebook.

Trump,  acting perhaps as a secret agent for the Biden campaign,   managed to target the most popular of all government institutions and agencies.  The post office got a 91 percent approval rating, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trump’s is in the high 30’s and still dropping. So yes, he is out of his mind, but we know that.

All over the country, Republican Senators and congressmen and women are running for their lives, catching hell from the rural constituents, many of who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

I have never seen or heard the people in my rural town as upset by anything Donald Trump has done as they are by his efforts to dismantle the post office before the general election so people who don’t want to get sick can vote by mail.

If you live in rural America, as I do, you already know that he is pointing a dagger right at the heart of rural life, and also the very center of his constituency.

Rural people may not like liberals or democrats or bureaucrats.

But they love their post offices and mail delivery, it is a lifeline for people without computers or computing skills or smartphones, and for veterans needing medication, seniors needing awaiting their Social Security, and the many millions of Americans – almost all rural – with broadband and who get and pay their bills by mail.

If you live in a city, almost everyone has a smartphone and a computer and lives off of one or the other. They are used to living online.

If you live in the country, it’s still a very different reality. Much of rural America has no broadband or inferior Internet access, which is a great obstacle to economic growth or equality.

And a grievance, a part of the reason Trump was elected.

Rural adults are less likely to have broadband than urban adults, use it less frequently, and own less technology.

And elderly people in the rural parts of the country want very much to be able to cast their votes by mail; it is hard enough for them to get to polling places in normal times.

I can’t help but think of Wendy, our much loved postal clerk here.

She is the only contact with the outside world for many widowed and elderly people. If they don’t come in to get their mail for a few days, she calls them at home to see if they are okay.

There is no one else in our town now who knows who these people are and who keeps track of them every day.

Post offices are the beating heart of rural communities, a place where people can see their neighbors and check out the bulletin boards that help so many people find work.

They are islands in a disconnecting seat that permits technology to disconnect us from one another.

Post offices are about a lot more than mail delivery.

The sometimes hopeless struggle for connection and community lives on in most rural communities in America.

If the post offices and mail service is lost to them, millions will be cut off the world and the support they need to live.

Many are lonely and fearful, and Wendy is often the only person many of them get to talk to during the week, to check on the weather, to talk about their illnesses, to miss their dead husbands, to find out where the fire engines were going the other night, to prepare for the big storm coming.

The mail she hands them contains the money for food and medicine, and sometimes the medication themselves, and the money orders they need to pay their utility bills and taxes.

She and the post office deliver the bills they have to pay, and the checks they have to send, and the letters to and from their children and grandchildren.

The few remaining small businesses depend on the post office to bring them the supplies they need and to ship the things they can still sell.

There is nothing more devastating Donald Trump could do the people who trusted him than cut this cord between them and the world beyond for his political gain.

President Trump is disintegrating rapidly; he’s making Joe Biden look like the winner of the Olympic Triathlon. His rantings and plots are getting wilder all the time and also confounding and senseless.

Every poll tells him he is doing the wrong thing and drawing more and more distrust and disapproval. His response is to do more things and worse things. Perhaps he thinks this will somehow all work for him. I don’t think so.

The rumors are already spreading in Washington after Kamala Harris’s stunning debut that Trump is seeking a woman vice-president. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Trump’s plan is to so mess up the election and the ballot counting that the election will be close enough to go the courts, who could, in his mind, invalidate the election or overturn it.

I believe he knows now that this is now his only chance.  I do not think that will happen. If Trump tries to steal the election, or in some way does, he will not have a nation to govern.

We can already see the tsunami growing, which would turn it into a volcanic eruption that would destroy any chance of him or the Republican Party governing.

Trump has a very low approval rating now; the Post Office has a very high one. Wouldn’t it make some sense to save them, not engineer its death?

He seems to think – actually, he admits – that he seeks to cripple the USPS to keep voters worried about the pandemic from mailing their votes.

It is apparent who he is targeting – blacks, Latinos, immigrants who might just stay at home rather than face long lines at polling places, and who are likely to vote for Joe Biden.

In other words, he’s going after the postal service to get more votes in the November election.

I’m not sure what the line is when we get to treason, but we couldn’t be too far away.

Post offices are sources of news and connection. Democracy is on the line, for sure, but so is community.

And here’s the other crazy part.

Trump is raising tens of millions of dollars for Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris- nearly $100 million since Trump conceded he is wrecking the post office for political reasons. He is drawing money and volunteers in droves too great to count.

He is making Biden a great success without having to work for it.

Small and big donors are flooding his campaign with money.

Trump is, in turn, inadvertently flooding the Coalition of Conscience with new members and newly aroused voters. Everyone is paying attention now.

Trump has also given Democrats a powerful new message on top of the pandemic.

Democrats see the attack on the Post Office as a gift, a chance to make significant inroads with constituencies who have long favored Republicans.

A good example is the blistering ad campaign launched this week by Jon Ossoff, who’s running against Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) this fall.

“Senator Perdue needs to take a stand on principle for once in his career,”
said Ossoff, “and demonstrate that his oath to the Constitution and his constituents is more important to him than his allegiance to President Trump and his Political Party.

There isn’t much that Perdue can say.

“If he permits the president to sabotage voting by mail, said Ossoff, “he will be condemned  by history as an accomplice to this attack on our democracy.”

As if his horrendous response to the coronavirus hasn’t hurt him enough,  he’s provided his opponents with a decision that goes straight to the heart and lives of so many people.

Trump said Thursday that he opposes both $3.6 billion in election aid for states and a $25 billion emergency bailout for the Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, part of a broader assault on mail-balloting that he has often claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud.

What is he really doing?

The media has never understood Trump; they simply exploited his charisma and enlarged his voice.

Reporters reject introspection or diagnoses, it frightens them, and most consider it unethical.

When a reporter asked Trump the other night if he regrets lying so often, Trump walked out of the room, and other reporters grumbled that the reporter was showboating.

And that is partly how we got into this mess, the reporter was asking the most important question anybody could have asked Trump, and he was the only one who has.

Like many wealthy people, Trump could always buy or manipulate his way out of trouble. He has never known consequences in his life or been challenged in this sustained, open, and humiliating way.

“Why don’t people like me?” he complains in public, an astonishing thing for a man just elected President by many millions of people to say.

Nobody believes anybody likes them if they hate themselves. I’ve been on that train.

The Post Office represents one of the last mileposts on  Trump’s march to loss, if not ruin.  It is an awful mistake and will blow up on him, just like Tulsa and St. John’s Church.

I’ve lived in rural America for years, and I saw that there was no love for Hilary Clinton and a lot for Donald Trump. But everybody up here loves the Post Office; it’s the only place where we can all come together every day.

It’s the only place old people go on the second Wednesday of every month to get their checks; the only way veterans can get their medicines delivered at home.

Two days ago, Democrats started blanketing the airwaves to highlight support for an institution with a higher approval rating than any other government body.

I believe this an important new issue for them at a time when Trump is already reeling from his poor decisions and awful leadership. They are coordinating their campaigns. They all jumped on it together.

I understand Trump believes that accessible mail-in ballots will probably cost him the election, and I get that he cares nothing about democracy.

But why give Democrats so much powerful ammunition against vulnerable Republican Senators and Congressman across the country?

They need people to be able to vote for them also.

In modern-day America, almost everyone in urban America has access to broadband Internet.

Microsoft said recently that its research shows that if broadband access was counted more precisely, the number of Americans without broadband is close to 163 million people, most of them in rural areas.

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of broadband. Rural people can’t stay at home as easily.  They have to go out to live. The rural poor and elderly have been slow to adapt to new technology.

Many people where I live don’t have a computer, or they lack digital literacy. For others, it’s too expensive.

The older and poorer people are, the less likely they are to feel the Internet is essential to their lives. Rural people have declining incomes and have lost tens of millions of jobs to China and Mexico. They don’t have expensive iPhones and Ipads to play with.

Most people in rural America depend on the mail to get their bills and checks and pay them.

Wired schools are not permitted under federal law to use their facilities outside of school hours, or to let students use them after hours.

The once-proud and powerful Republican Senate no longer exists to soften or challenge him, it is gone now,  reduced to a weak and powerless echo chamber, reflecting only the mad impulses of our own  Caligula (a Roman Emperor, who reigned in A.D. 37-41.)

Caligula, like Trump,  began his reign as a populist, freeing citizens unjustly imprisoned and cutting taxes.

But he fell ill, like Trump, and he began stalking and killing political rivals, declaring himself a living God. He made his horse a priest. He was attacked by a group of guardsmen and killed.

More and more Trump acts like the mad emperor, without restraint or limits on his power.

He makes decisions like a person with nothing to lose, someone who is fulfilling his manifest destiny, to be King, but in the process, failing more and more each day. That seems to be tearing him apart.

You can’t see him just as an arrogant and rogue President; he can’t be understood outside of the context of being sick, his behavior and his decisions are simply no longer rational or even possible.

They are not explainable in any other way.

The reporters who see him every day say they it is something of a horror show now. Before their eyes, Trump is turning into the Joe Biden he insisted was too feeble-minded and confused to lead.

Age, lies, and perhaps even illness of his own, they say, are causing the President to age rapidly and become more and more incoherent and confused.

Nobody needs to take any reporter’s word for this, you can see it for yourself in any one of the rambling, dishonest, and incoherent news conferences he is staging every night.

Yes, we are in for a bloody fight. Not, it’s not Armageddon, and when it is over, I have a feeling we may all be better for it. I believe a kinder America is just over the horizon, and I look forward to being a proud citizen of my country again.

Trump has not destroyed our democracy; it is much bigger than he is.

Trump has awakened what Kamala Harris calls the Coalition of Conscience, our own guardsmen, and they are working day and night to defeat him.

And they will because truth does matter, and justice does matter and honor does matter in America, yes, even now.