Does  Trump have a scalp under there?

It seems that none of his worshippers have the stomach to give Donald Trump the bad news:

Those flag-waving men he loves so much with their big guns, riding around in their big gas-guzzling trucks, and paintball guns can make a lot of noise. But they make little sense.

A President can’t make his people feel safe while he’s scaring the hell out of them. Even for a man of fatal flaws and contradictions, this is a monster miscalculation.

There are just not enough of these angry white men, which is their grievance, to begin with. If there were, they wouldn’t feel so threatened.

Like Custer’s, this last stand was doomed from the start. Custer was arrogant too, and he paid for it with his scalp. John Wayne famously said that big men don’t have to talk tough.

Trump is putting together a Little Man’s Army.

I keep thinking every morning that I’ll skip politics today, but Donald Trump, if nothing else, is a great gift to any political writer. I could almost drown in the good material he provides, and he never runs out of material.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I need to be cautious and not get sucked into the endless he-said, he-said drama; it’s easy to end up doing his work for him.

I am surprised at how quickly Trump has once again gambled and bet his political future on one dubious thing: frightening suburban women and “moderate independents” about violence and disorder.

The easiest way to understand this critical and defining stage of the campaign is to think of it as a very high-powered chess game. I make a move; you make a move.

In this case, the winner gets to run a big and powerful country.

Trump’s strategy is simple: to distract attention from the pandemic, which was eroding his popularity, and focus it instead on one of his most successful and comfortable issues: sowing hate and division.

It’s an odd thing to say, but Trump is not capable of being a true racist; he has no ideology other than being great in the world’s eyes.

And he is too disorganized. He is color blind to people of any color or origin who like him, incredibly offensive, and cruel to those who don’t. He is happy to be a racist if necessary.

He is an Opportunistic Racist, not the genuine kind.

This is his idea of a tactic, a campaign strategy.

It is much more relevant to the 1960s and ’70s, or earlier than now. We are not a static country, we are changing all the time. Just ask gay people who marry. A lot of Americans want to deal with race, as long as people aren’t burning their downtowns down.

People have seen a lot – too much of Trump – these past four years. I don’t think there are many people out there who will love him for his new , or fail to recognize it for what it is, an especially naked and self-serving political ploy.

The angry young both left, and the angry young right has given him his best opening yet in what has been a dismal campaign. He’s going with violence; the pandemic doesn’t show his best side.

Mostly white kids out of college and without jobs to go to have teamed up with some angry black kids in the same boat, but with a better cause.

Together, they have made demonstrating, vandalizing, hurting cops, and occasionally burning things down their mission.

Other than the fact that it draws a lot of attention, and it’s cool and exciting to challenge authority and break windows, handing Trump a potential lifejacket is the only thing I can see them all accomplishing. Violence is quite literally senseless, as are the people who carry it out.

Some of these protests have become more serious than many imagined. Lots of disturbed people in America have big guns, and people are getting shot and killed.

And oh yes, they are also protesting police brutality and assuming every police officer in the country gets up in the morning intending to murder African-Americans.

We do seem to need a leader who believes in dialogue, not violence. And who can talk about reforming policing in America, not abolish it.

And meanwhile, another black man gets shot five times in the back with his children sitting a few feet away.

On the other side, we see that Trump’s troll army is not just online.

They have big and expensive pick-ups and can afford to buy giant flags, paintball shooting kits, and pepper-spray and bear mace and high power assaulted rifles made famous in our country for murdering children in their classrooms.

I honestly can’t imagine proudly carrying one of those guns around.

The Black Lives Matter organizers are focused and well organized.

They understand the danger of what mindless violence and looting could do to their cause.  And it has been damaged by association.

BLM has almost always demonstrated peacefully and in an orderly and lawful way. That they promote violence is one of Trump’s favorite and most repeated lies.

Trump also understands the danger BLM poses to his re-election, so he has lumped them in with Joe Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a very odd couple) to suggest the dark forces of the left are preparing to let all those young men burn down the country.

And while they are at it,  the suburbs, where all those suburban “housewives” live and are presumably cowering underneath their sofas at the thought of being overrun with Black people.

We have seen much evidence about how Trump sees women, but this stereotype shows us that he doesn’t like or know many.

To accomplish his goal, all Trump has to do is make sure the fighting, killing, and looting gets worse and continues until election day.

He’s doing his best, even defending the 17-year-old who brought an assault rifle to a Portland demonstration and ended up shooting three people, one fatally.

Trump loves taking the most extreme positions, it reinforces the idea of him as a great disrupter.

Otherwise, people might remember the pandemic that is disrupting their lives and remember that he has done nothing meaningful about it, beyond recommending drinking Chlorox as a handy way to kill bacteria. (Do not try it at home as some Trump followers have.)

Just as Joe Biden was emerging from his Delaware basement and heading out to campaign, Trump has put him on the defensive, forcing him to deny that he favors looting, violence, and vandalism.

Think of any presidential candidate being forced to make such denial at all.  Trump does that all the time and is rarely confronted about it.

Trump was smart, he wants to rile up his followers and attract some new ones, but mostly he needed to change the campaign’s narrative – how he screwed up the government’s handling of the coronavirus.

If Trump has a genius (like a fox), it is controlling the narrative.

Everything is about him all the time. No other candidate can really get much space to breathe. Biden seems to be conscious of this and will travel the country, reminding people of the pandemic and Trump’s runaway racism.

The whole country is talking about his taxpayer-funded trip to Kenosha, not the approximately 1,000 people who will die today from Covid-19.

In going after Biden in this way, Trump is terrifying the already terrified Democrats, who have always had weak hearts, but are now peeing all over themselves.

I try to be as detached as I can when writing this, but last night, there was one of the campaign’s magical moments on Fox News. Trump compared instances of the police shooting black men and women to golfers who “choke” when trying to sink “a three-foot putt.”

Even by Trumpian standards, it was a curious thing to say, and host Laura Ingraham tried to save him, warning him that people like me might think he was comparing blacks’ police shootings to playing golf.

Trump didn’t get the message.  He did compare police officers who shoot blacks to golfers who “choke”.

Biden will stick that one right up until Trump’s ass when the President talks about how much he loves Black people. He destroys his own messages whenever he speaks.

This tells us that Trump is off the reservation again, as even the compliant advisers who work for him must have been horrified to hear or see him make such a comparison.

And this, just a few days after the Republican Party spent millions of dollars portraying as a caring, empathetic leader who has done more for Blacks than Abraham Lincoln.

Honestly, I’ve written more than a score of books, but I could never have made that up.

As much of a struggle as Biden and Harris will have to compete on messaging with Donald Trump, it seems clear enough already that Trump is overreaching and is suicidally self-centered. He lives in rage and delusion.

Just as he blew the chance to be a leader during the Spring when the pandemic struck, he is now blowing an equally important opportunity.

I’m sure his MAGA trolls will celebrate his blatant racism and support for violence, but those suburban women and moderates who can make or break him will almost surely not.

Apart from  Trump’s supporters, the country is practically screaming for normalcy, quiet, and calm. Trump is showing is every day that he just can’t do that.

These suburban women are not “housewives” any longer, as Trump keeps on referring to them. Many are working women who bear little resemblance to those docile domestics he seems to be thinking of. They are sophisticated, media, and politics savvy, and they are peeling away from Trump in droves.

They live near Black of women now and people of color, and immigrants as well. The suburbs are different now, and it sounds like Trump has never been in one.

This is not the message they are looking to hear. Trump has pulled out racist tropes dating back hundreds of years – the slaves will arise and kill the white people who have enslaved them. This is a different world.

Poll after poll shows that moderates and independents – the very group Trump is trying to impress – want an end to the chaos and conflict that mirror’s Trump’s damaged psyche, as his niece pointed out so convincingly in her still a best-selling book.

That is at the core of Biden’s support.

To put it simply, people are tired of all the shit he spews under the guise of being a savior instead of a President. He is telling us every day that he is the problem, not the solution.

He will boost his polling numbers for sure, but not enough and not for long. He will see to that personally.

Biden’s speeches so far have been calming and soothing and even eloquent.  He’s not bold and dramatic. He doesn’t really look like much of a leftist radical, and so far, he surely doesn’t have a fraction of his opponent’s cognitive problems.

Trump was politically unknown in 2016; lots of people who wanted change took a chance on him. Biden has been in public life for half-a-century. Anyone who thinks’s he’s a socialist is a threat to family and friends.

If you have any faith in science at all – I do – the pandemic is likely to come snarling back, and in the Midwest, already is.

A new book by a New York Times reporter reports that Vice President Mike Pence was put on standby to temporarily assume the presidency’s power during Trump’s sudden and unannounced visit to Walter Reed Army Hospital in November of 2019.

Trump has never revealed the true cause of that visit, and this quite credible report from a  respected journalist makes it almost impossible for him to paint Biden as unfit from office for health reasons.

He will be asked about his health now everywhere he goes, a fate he tried to give Joe Biden.

Trump does not seem healthy to me, physically or mentally.

That is not a conspiracy theory; it is something almost everyone who comes in contact with him in Washington can see.

Franklin Roosevelt could get away with hiding his polio, but this is 2020, the age of social media, and nobody gets away with anything for too long.

I can only imagine what is going on in Trump’s head, but I would not want to be there. He looks tired and defeated.

The political message is that Trump doesn’t really need an opponent to point out the self-destructive, frightening, polarizing, and even dangerous harm he is doing to his fellow citizens.

It is becoming clearer by the day that Trump’s handling of the pandemic has killed people and is likely to kill many more. It will follow him all through his campaign.

Famed Washington Post Chronicler Bob Woodward is publishing his new tell-all in September. More dirt to come.

It is unlikely that the looting and violence will continue through November; the cold weather will stop it if nothing else has.

The mayors and governors of Seattle, Portland, and Kenosha are moving aggressively to contain the violence, which is beginning to ebb in all of those places, despite Sunday’s Trump Caravan through Portland.

If the governors and mayors succeed ( and they almost certainly will), that makes Trump’s most important issue irrelevant, even as the crafty pandemic prepares for another comeback.

A columnist wrote this week that it is a good thing Trump is scaring his opponents. The more frightened they are, the more likely they are to vote, and early voting begins in a couple of weeks in many states.

Imagine how eager to vote most African-Americans will be after hearing the President compare the officer who choked George Floyd to death to a nervous golfer taking a “three-putt,” whatever the hell that means.

Biden should send him a gift card.

Whatever he says or does, Biden, in many ways, turns out to be the perfect candidate to run against an unbalanced yet still dangerous candidate. He just looks good for breathing.

In insisting that he alone can make us safe, Donald Trump along is putting us in danger. As usual, the poor and the vulnerable will pay the most. There is only one story in the world, my first editor told me: the rich screwing the poor.

But you don’t have to be a savvy politician to see the trap there for him.

And since he never listens or backs down or apologizes, he will stick with it to the end. The Republican Convention succeeded in part because Trump was pretending not to be Trump.

Away from the Tele-Prompter, we see the real one. It just gets worse and worse.

I believe he is making yet another mistake in this new and hateful turn. Whatever most Americans are looking for, it is not a return of the KKK.

Many people want to believe there is a rational, empathetic man somewhere underneath all the bluster and lies.

I want to believe it, he is our President, and if he fails, all of us fail with him in many ways.

But he won’t let me do it. This man can’t survive a campaign or four more years as a leader with responsibilities that go beyond moving his big fat mouth.

But here is what’s lurking in my mind:  does he really have a scalp up there? Can we see it?