Watching Donald Trump’s excited MAGA Angry White Boys (I have yet to see a black MAGA in a pickup with a giant flag flapping) in the wind, I keep flashing back to my time on a neighborhood playground when I was in middle school.

Mostly the angry little white boys had little to do with me, a Jew from another neighborhood. Sometimes they let me bring my  toy pick up with a big bed full of big blue bubble gum balls to throw at the smaller kid and then run and hide.

It was fun, then. It’s different now.

If you want to understand the election, match the behavior of 10-year-old boys that you know to our President Donald Trump, and the Angry White Boys he lead, and you will have a much better sense of what has become of the presidential election in 2020 and how to understand the madness that has slowly enveloped our country.

When Mary Trump says Donald Trump is a little man, not a big one, she wasn’t kidding.

The angry white men, simmering for years at their displacement,  have a leader to follow as they make their last stand against the armies of women, Blacks, people of color, elitists and eggheads, young people, scientists, ministers, journalists,  and anyone with a college degree.

Trump isn’t just the leader of the Angry White Men, he is one of those playground kids  personified – bullying, lying, complaining, name-calling, disrupting, disturbing.

Our country is in the hands of An Angry White Boy, who has never grown up to be a man. He commands a growing Army of other Angry White Boys, they are his shock troops.

This is the Last Stand of the Angry White Men, their time is coming,  and they have their General Custer tweeting them on, ignoring the warnings and advice of all the wise men around him and gathering his boys in a circle.

Come and get us.

If we’re going down, we’re going down fighting.

I admit that I loved being one of the bad and angry boys during my brief appearances in the playground. It made a weak and frightened boy feel strong and fearless, at least for a few minutes.

You can either eat lunch or be lunch, said my father. It was pretty heady to be eating lunch once in awhile.

As the 2020 campaign gets red hot, our new national Man Child and Lucifer is tweeting to his legions to get the pot boiling so he can frighten enough suburban “housewives” and fence-sitting independents into voting for him and winning re-election.

You can wonder when our country went stark raving mad, but you have to admit this one of the most interesting countries on the earth. No one ever imagined we would get here.

The Angry White Boys are now Angry White Men and they are watching Fox News and appearing regularly in cities where Black Lives Matter protesters are marching and are vocal. BLM is just about everything these angry and resentful frightened boys fear.

Over the weekend, hundreds of them drove their trucks into embattled  Portland, looking for a fight, tossing objects into protesters and pepper spraying them when they could. They were clearly out to spark some more violence, so their leader could vow to stop it.

Sadly, they got a fight, a member of a far right-wing Christian organization was shot and killed.

Trump also got what he was looking for, a jarring symbol of chaos and discord. In his campaign, Trump is pretending that Joe Biden already won and is President and he is campaigning against him to clean things up. The scary thing is that he seems to believe it.

It worked the first time. Why not try it again? Again.

The good news is that Biden is rising to the challenge, the contrast between him and Donald Trump could not possibly be greater.

These images over the weekend were revelatory to me.

An epiphany.

They brought me back to the middle school playground and helped me understand what I was seeing in those videos. I saw that we have a President who is really a child. No wonder he relates to them so easily.

I keep remembering that the most popular toy among the boys were blue and red pick-up trucks. Many of them wore baseball caps.

They loved to play with those American flags on sticks and attach them to their pick-ups. Those with battery-powered trucks formed parades and marched around the playground, flags flapping in the wind.

They loved to frighten and annoy people. They loved to throw things at unsuspecting passers by. They loved making trouble and being in trouble.

Sometimes they were soldiers, sometimes they were fighting Russians, sometimes Native-Americans, sometimes criminals. Sometimes the victims were anybody who walked by.

They were already angry, even then, I recall, testosterone mixing with a grievance.  The secret formula of Trumpism. Everyone is out to screw us, everyone is taking advantage of us.  Their hero was the Joker or other bad guy stars of the comics of the time. Superman was too much of a goodie-goodie.

Now that I think about it, they were already full of grievances. They were always complaining, they all had chips on their shoulders.

They hated the teacher’s pets. They hated the Jews, who they thought were all rich and scheming. They hated the Blacks who they thought were all thieves. They hated the poor people who they thought were all lazy. They hated the teachers, who pressured them and punished them. They hated the Irish, who they thought were all drunks. They hated the Chinese, who should go back to their country.

They hated anyone who had authority over them and tried to use it.

And a lot of them hated their fathers, as did I, for not understanding them or caring about them.

When it comes back to me, and I watch the news, it is startling to match this memory up to this reality. They seem just the same to me. But as I look back, I know they never had a leader before, celebrating and reflecting on their anger and victimization, cheering them on.

Can you really be a bad guy when the leader of the Free World is showering glowing tweets on you?

The boys had slingshots and big fat chewing gumballs to spit out at other people watching in the playground. Some threw firecrackers.

Almost all of the boys had toy guns, plastic, or “cap” guns and they were always waving them at one another and shooting at real or perceived enemies. A lot of them had slingshots, to fire pellets at kids riding their bikes by the playground. I wasn’t really good with guns or trucks, I was just trying to fit in.

I usually was excluded from the fun. Sometimes I wanted to belong, but I knew I was kidding myself. I’d never get in.  They didn’t trust me.

Just as well, I got some fish instead and became a fish nerd.

Honestly, if you teleported these kids into the future, they could easily have been the men in that Portland parade, every one of them, from what I could see, young and white. Many standing up in their truck beds, firing pepper spray, and waving their Trump flags.

Testosterone meets Trumpism. Perhaps both are the same thing.

These young men, these angry young white MAGA men, are not ideological. They are not interested in political discussions or arguments about governing systems. They have no respect for disagreement or dissent. They are terrified of women displacing them.

People who want to talk about things don’t go riding through towns and cities in big parades showing off their rifles and tossing urine bottles at opponents.

They are not normally into politics, but until now, politics was never fun like this is. Now, they belong. Now, the reporters are, and school teaches and parents are paying attention to them. Now the smart kids and stuffpots are afraid of them.

They are having fun, just like the kids in the playground.

They are bad and angry again, scaring old ladies and men again, tormenting elitists and liberals, and best of all, riding around in parades of big pickups with giant flags.

I’m not sure they really represent the spirit and meaning of those American flags, but it doesn’t really matter. The flags are props, toys. They don’ signify patriotism, they signify rebellion, and perhaps that is an American trait.

The young man killed during the parade was a tragic sacrifice. And for what? How brave to you have to be to ride in a parade of hundreds of trucks and shout at people and wave your rifles and throw things at them?

Adolescent boys and young men live for moments like this Portland Parade in their dreams and fantasies.

They imagine themselves in victory parades, showing their flags, scaring the hell out of everybody,  blowing gum at their critics and rivals, driving through town, throwing things at people.

Since the playground days, they never got to do this until now. I would bet none of them have been in political parade their whole lives.

President Trump, the Godfather of the Angry White Men, has given them a chance to live out their dreams and fantasies. And to be important.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that Trumpism is about angry white men and some angry white women. Nobody else is really welcome. Nobody else is joining the parade.

The term “Angry White Male” is described in Wikipedia as a “derogatory term,” but more and more, I see it as a descriptive one. It is the point of this election.

The term commonly refers to a political voting bloc that emerged in the early 1990s as a reaction to perceived injustices faced by white men in the face of affirmative action quotas in the workplace.

Angry white men are characterized as having animosity toward young people, women, or minorities, just like their leader.

Trump supporters have been described by some political commentators and liberal-leaning media companies as angry white men. That is a generalization, of course, and it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Lots of white women feel alienated by their government and angry about their lives as well. They don’t seem to be having as much fun as the MAGA boys, with their big red hats, guns and pickups.

When else could they ride around disrupting and scaring people and getting praised by a President? When else could they be part of an enraged populist movement without really bothering to engage in the democratic system’s work at all?

I feel like a broken record. This won’t work either.

Once again, I believe President Trump has greatly overplayed his hand. He grabs onto a legitimate issue – how to deal with unrest – and turns it into a racial or cultural war.

In so doing, he eliminates any opportunity for dialogue or empathy or compromise and forces everyone to separate and take sides. This, not his conservative politics,  is what most people are sick of, and this is what will do him in.

I fear for the Angry White Boys when Trump is gone. Only he could have gotten this far with it. I don’t think Ivanka and Donald Jr. are up to it.