(I’ll be away most of Monday.  Thanks to all of you for making my political writing feel like a success. It was the right thing for me to do.)

This week it’s Donald Trump’s chance to try to turn things around. He is, as expected, obsessed with the opportunity to be a producer again on such a big stage.

He is reportedly convinced he alone can put on the greatest nominating convention program ever.

The media will be in a frenzy, keeping everybody angry or frightened over his every word and utterance. I’m here to suggest that you don’t buy into that.

He erred in claiming that Joe Biden was senile, so the pressure is on.

He would have been wiser to portray his opponent as being out of touch than incoherent. Moral errors don’t bother Trump, but this was a strategic one. He made himself look more incoherent than ever.

One of the curious things about Trump is that he always shoots too low when going even a teeny bit higher would be more successful.

By deciding to be more vicious than he needed to be and crueler,  he gave Biden an easy way to look timely and relevant just by breathing and speaking loudly.

I can’t remember much of what Biden said, but it didn’t matter.

Being kind has never in American political history been considered an asset. But Biden is a good man, which years of his nasty competitor have transformed into a valuable asset.

He is surrounded by a ring of remarkable women, that has never been a valuable asset before either.

They are every bit as tough as he is nice.

Donald Trump is not nice, and he seems to dislike remarkable women. It’s not a good formula for him.

So here we are—the Republican Presidential Nominating Convention, which Trump is planning mostly by himself. Lord Help Us.

This week, the media will try to rattle your nerves by writing endlessly about all the past presidents and candidates – Democrat Michael Dukakis (1988) in particular – who were far ahead at this point in their campaigns, but who fell to one or more of the Republican’s now finely honed kneecapping assaults.

I’ve read this story a half dozen times this week, and it’s so full of holes I couldn’t begin to count them.

Trump, like Bush and Reagen before him,  is essentially the candidate of Aggrieved White People. Only Trump is more enthusiastically racist and less competent than any of the others. Bush and Reagan felt bad about their racist ads, both said letter.

For Trump, it’s just a chance to crow about who he is.

I call the Republican’s the Angry Old White People’s Party, about to state the Angry Old White People’s Nomination Convention, some Black people sprinkled in like sprinkles on a cake.

The campaign seeks to fuel the very entrenched white American fear of Blacks and immigrants of any color, legal or not.

Many working-class whites believe-  as their fathers and grandfathers believed – that these “others” are interlopers who benefit to their disadvantage.

Their welfare checks are too big and generous, their food stamps too expensive, their unemployment checks too large, they take white people’s jobs for little money, they use our social services,  the deserve their evictions, and health problems are their own lazy fault.

They should go back where they came from, Americans as well as foreigners.

For generations now, the Republican Party and its wealthy corporate supporters have advanced the idea of “preserving whiteness.” Nobody asked me, but this is a tragic mistake.

At a time when at least a half dozen Republican governors are busy trying to suppress Black voters, the party has become an almost tragically short-sighted official home of racism.

They ought to check the numbers. There is no future in this for them. President Trump is taking them back a hundred years.

Rather than attract and welcome immigrants, the party enables the idea that they should be kept out, that the doors be closed; Whiteness needs a big moat around it.

Even after scores of horrific mass shootings in schools, polls found that Americans were more than twice as to blame “illegal gun dealers” or “mental illness” than politicians, policies, or the NRA.

Mass shootings and violence are not seen as a social problem to be addressed by the government, but a need to fortify the walls and guard the gates from the barbarians.

Americans, like their President, are narcissistic, they don’t care that every other civilized nation in the world doesn’t let people run around with lethal combat machine guns.

And contrary to the stereotypes, as many rural kids get shot as urban kids. The American Pediatric Association found that fire-arm related injuries among children occur more frequently in rural than in urban locations. Researchers found that more than 60 percent of these injuries are preventable.

This is the core ethos President Trump will present to the American people at his convention this week, his great gamble for re-election, this idea that poverty, violence, and poor or no access to health care should be defended, not prevented.

Sociologists call this the Castle Doctrine. Whiteness is a Castle; Trump is their guardian. White Privilege doesn’t begin to describe it.

The first mainstream practitioner in the modern take-no-prisoners presidential campaign world was George Bush, whose “Willie Horton” attack ad invited acceptable racist grievance politics and knocked Michael Dukakis out of his lead and led to his defeat.

Willie Horton was an African-American prisoner in Massachusetts who, while released on a furlough program, raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend.

Bush cited the case as evidence that his opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, wasn’t tough on crime.

At the time, Horton was the prototype suburbanite’s terror, and politicians have been exploiting this fear ever since.

Trump is making the same accusation about Biden and Harris. The ad became infamous for stoking racial hatred and is already much milder than the ads Trump is putting out all over social media.

This ushered in the era of win- by- all- costs- and- by- any means.

This not-to-subtle racism was a powerful elevation in the white castle culture that is now an integral part of presidential campaigns.

This movement writes Jonathan Metzel in his book Dying Of Whiteness,  has succeeded in casting Whiteness as a castle under siege.

The policies that sustain this do come with cultural benefits and privilege.

People can now carry guns openly in much of the country, but this idea of whiteness has also come at a terrible cost to working-class whites themselves.

Mostly, the Republican Party and their conservative followers have been chipping away at the idea that government serves as a social net, instead of cutting programs, lowering taxes and shrinking the number of federal and state workers.

Democrats have been too busy shipping jobs overseas and getting paid by lobbyists to do much to stop it.

Republicans and conservatives have also been relentless – and successful – at challenging science and scientific theory, from climate change to epidemics and pandemics.

We are learning the price we all pay for that.

These messages find a receptive audience in many working-class white people, who have seen their communities and jobs and families and farms ravaged by the indifference of both political parties. Some are merely re-playing the Civil War.

The Republicans have won this grievance war, Democrats have lost their once-powerful grip on working people.

This change in the way we see government obscures the plagues that have arisen within the castle walls. It has made life much harder and more difficult for every group but the rich.

Evermore guns and ever more tax cuts have weakened the foundations of life in white communities, as well as Black ones.

Whites in rural America are now also suffering terribly from gun violence, lethal drug epidemics, high unemployment and suicide rates, the death of Main Street and small business, the collapse fo the family farm,  the lack of health care.

The federal government is no longer taking responsibility for or committing significant funds to address any of these problems, either in rural or urban America.

All of these tragic crises could have been addressed and were once addressed by governments, especially the federal government, which alone has the resources to help.

Trump has made himself the King of the Castle, the idea that white people, especially working-class white people and Evangelical Christians, are under siege. Some are beginning to figure out that he is the problem, not the solution.

Even though he has been the leader of the country for four years, he has and will this week present himself as the outsider fighting to keep the castle safe. It is a wonder of our curious times that his supporters don’t ask, “Hey, aren’t you in charge now?”

In presidential politics, it’s usually the incumbent who is set upon by the “outsider,” but Trump plays both roles. Racist advertising is no longer very controversial, it’s now a staple of our presidential elections.

In St. Louis, lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey drew guns on peaceful racial justice protesters who marched – illegally and without permission – through the grounds of their $1.5 million mansions last month.

Although none of the protesters harmed them or their property, the McCloskeys cane out to point their guns at them, they saw and responded to the very thing some white people and many Trump supporters have long feared the most:

Black people coming through their gates.

In so doing, they became willing poster children for the Castle Culture. The McCloskeys were widely condemned by Black, Democratic and progressive leaders.

President Trump immediately sensed their significance as spokespeople for “whiteness” and invited them to speak at his convention this week.

One might argue that the worst thing a President could do in racially charged times was glorifying and even honor people who draw guns on Black people who are protesting peacefully.

Trump can’t help himself; he always makes a bad situation worse.

Upon stepping down in 1809 from the presidency, Jefferson wrote to his republican supporters that the most important lesson he learned while President was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

Donald Trump’s core belief is precisely the opposite, a theme that will almost certainly be front and center at his nomination and acceptance.

If you consider Jefferson word for word against Trump,  you can see for yourself that Trump’s values are almost entirely the opposite of Jefferson’s, in every way.

Trump presents government as a corrupt plague, a leftist conspiracy out to destroy him. That will be another critical theme of his nominating convention.

This is the old and bitter conflict now playing itself out in our presidential election.

I’ve been crawling out on limbs in much of my political writing, and so far, so good. I’ll do it again this week.

In a few days, Trump will get his “bump” the media talks about so much; presidents always do when they are re-nominated.

But it will be small and short-lived. Be prepared and unimpressed.

Trump does not read his history or anything else much; his grievance was formed early and powerfully as progressive and social elites of New York thought him pathetic and gauche and refused to invite him to their parties and summer homes.

Trump’s niece Mary and now, his sister Maryanne have testified to his cruelty and lack of principles.

His friends have told interviewers that he never forgave the  “elites” for snubbing him in New York when he was desperate for their approval.

Once in the White House, he began taking his revenge on the country. His “Deep State,” say his biographers, is just a handy pseudonym for New York snobs.

It isn’t policy or ideology that drives Donald Trump, it’s an outsider’s grievance, and in that, he connects with the battered and increasingly displaced world of Whiteness.

But this can’t work in 2020.

The reason is that the “others” are much more numerous and powerful and politically connected than George Bush could have imagined when he approved those racist adds.

George Bush was an experienced, qualified, and articulate candidate.  He was no Donald Trump.

Joe Biden is no Michael Dukakis; he is known, much warmer, and more experienced.

And Black people, especially  Black Women, are no longer either voiceless or powerless. Just look at Black Lives Matter, now the largest social movement in America.

Black women mayors are all over TV, explaining and defending themselves and torture the white mayors who try to block and stop their every move.

Racists and brutal police officers are called out on cellphones and social media platforms all over the country. If George Floyd were not seen by so many people on social media videos, the country would be in a very different place right now, another Black man killed by police officers without much fuss.

The national conversation on racism (and statues) has just begun. And Donald Trump is leading his party to the wrong side of the bridge.

There were no social media to speak of in 1988. The network’s evening newscasts and morning newspapers were about the only place people could go to follow the campaigns.

That goofy photo of Gov. Dukakis sitting in a tank turret in an oversized helmet was seen by everyone in the world.

Everybody is making ads these days, not just the political people.

Almost everyone saw one of the evening newscasts in 1988.

Our media world has splintered a thousand different ways since then.

No one ad can define a presidential race when the country is split into two halves of partisan, ideology-driven voters, most conditioned to despite the opposition and never change their minds.

Women alone can make the difference in this election, and from all accounts, they are not likely to change their minds about Trump because he bullies, lies, and bloviates on TV for a few nights.

Trump has an established habit of pleasing his core supporters and enraging almost everyone else. Good for promoting hatred, bad for winning national elections in 2020.

That is what Trump can’t get and won’t understand.

I find it hard to believe he will change and become reasonable and competent and empathetic just because he is being nominated and gets hours of free air time.

He has seldom done the rational thing. Big audiences drive him wild, like animals hearing frequencies the rest of us can’t hear. Free air time is always his formula for disaster.

Many people of color live in wealthy and culturally powerful cities, and thanks to social media, they have become skilled in connecting with one another. Women, in particular, have developed a skill at embracing and manipulating new communications tools.

They are well organized and well connected, and almost every one of them is out for the President’s hide.

Journalists are often stuck in the past; few seem to grasp the new present or the future. These alarmist comparisons with previous elections are foolish and unknowing.

In George Bush’s time, there was no MeToo movement, no Black Lives Matter, no Portland moms, no women Black mayors, no suburban women who hate to be called “housewives,” no Black Vice-Presidential candidate with a prosecutor’s heart and a movie star smile, no politicized army of black female voters, led by people like Stacy Abrams, a type who also did not exist in public life 15-20 years ago.

The other opponent that George Bush and the Republicans did not have to face was the coronavirus pandemic, one of the greatest opponents any President has faced in American history.

Trump, for reasons that are becoming obvious now, never accepted the virus as a threat, he sees it only as a means of threatening his get-even campaign and is tearing up much of the government every day trying to turn his disastrous campaign around.

The limb I’m claiming out on is this: I don’t care what the pundits say, or what Fox News or CNN or MSNBC commentators say or what the hyper-heated media says.

Trump can’t do it.

He can’t figure out how to stop the pandemic, he can’t make the economy come back in time for November, he can’t conjure up a vaccine people will trust, he can’t hide from the Post Office outrage.

As the election looms, he is unprepared for the inevitable rise and spread of the pandemic back and forth all over the country because he has dug such a deep and stupid and tragic hole for himself that there is no way of stopping it now.

You can see the panic in him now by his reckless politicizing of the federal government for his personal gain.

I don’t believe  Republicans will be able to get away with demonizing Black Americans for too much longer; Black activists are finding their voice and their political power.

More than any other group of Americans, American women – white and black and yellow –  are feeling their oats and beginning the long and painful task of helping to first save their country, and then heal it.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all those women are in the right place at the right time and the right way to capitalize on these very radical changes in American life.

Watch Trump this week if you need to, but be forewarned. It will be hateful and upsetting. And there will be no escaping it. It is unlikely to do more than make a deafening amount of noise.

So brace yourself and take the long view.

And it won’t work, I don’t care how many government agencies Trump throws into chaos. It can’t work because he isn’t up to it.

America is his seventh bankruptcy, and this time, he is being called to account.