When I hear President Trump spout his wild conspiracy theories and rage about ol’ huggy and genial Grandpa Joe Biden as a dangerous radical leftist, I always think of Edvard Munch’s the Scream.

It is the perfect symbol of  Donald Trump’s tenure in office and this bizarre Presidental campaign.

The image is an autobiographical, expressionistic construction based on Munch’s actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk. His two companions, seen in the background, had left him.

The sound, say art historians,  must have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal state, as  Trump’s is all the time.  Munch renders it in a style which, if pushed to extremes, can destroy human integrity.

Hey, if the shoe fits.

It seems that Trump supporters are less neurotic and more confident than Democrats and Progressives and Biden supporters.

They seem tougher and more confident than Democrats and Trump opponents. One reason for this is that most of them watch Fox News and those myopic red-meat blogs and probably have no idea that Trump’s re-election is in deep trouble.

I guess they may soon be as traumatized as Clinton’s followers were four years ago.

I read recently that fearful Democrats drive the Biden campaign calling them day and night crazy with their worries and concerns. Progressives live in dread of a Trump victory, it is a public health problem in many places,  and many Democrats now have paranoia permanently embedded in their consciousness. It’s a hard time for them.

I hear from them every day, Bedwetters moaning that they wish they could believe that Trump might lose, but they dare not. That’s probably good for Biden, but the truth is there is a lot of good solid evidence that he will win.

I don’t know what they want from me, they should be taking my word for it; they might consider getting out and Do Something instead of fretting.

Biden’s staff, which seems quite cool and focused on me,  calls them “bed-wetters,” which caught my eye as a long-time bedwetter well into my adolescence.

We are a tribe, we bedwetters, we never learned to trust the people who were supposed to take care of us but didn’t. Trump is the mystical face of all of them.

To panic is to play Trump’s own game; he lives in a permanent state of panic and pain, and his mission is to spread it and put it to work for him. It is not easy to be mentally ill; I can testify to it.

Trump scared the pants off of liberals and fellow elitists after his elaborate and gaseous acceptance speech and overblown a trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to promise millions of dollars in aid and drop conspiracy theories and racist fear-mongering on that distracted and troubled city.

Trump has a King thing, he seems unable to tuck it away.

The Bed-wetters can learn a lot about staying steady and hopeful from the last couple of weeks.

Trump is simply acting out of impulse now, unleashing his dark and broken side, which he never revealed as starkly as he has since the convention. Every day there is another Hail Mary, a stink bomb he hopes will explode, not disarmed.

But he forgets to do the math. There are just not enough of the MAGA people to do this all by himself, and he doesn’t really have anybody else to pick up the slack and get him across the line.

We can see the patterns in his mistakes now.

Trump is in love with himself, and when he gives those speeches, he loses his grip on reality and Delusion Trump takes over. He seems to dwell in a fantasy world where he is Captain America appearing to slay the dragons that are tearing our society apart.

And he starts screaming, terrified, and pushed to extremes that obliterate human integrity.

Of course, it’s mostly lies, but he is so over the top now that he makes it almost impossible for the very people he most needs to vote for him to do so. Today, 51 percent say Biden would keep them safe from harm, 45 percent say Trump would.

Only his already rabid followers buy the idea of mystery plans filled with men in black heading to disrupt his convention.

He needs to always be the victim, and his people always need to be victims; the more victims, the more people he is saving in his sadly broken mind.

Does he know any suburban women, I wonder? Or any political moderates sitting on the fence? I know some and checked in with a few this week, and the ones I talked about were horrified by Trump’s naked racism and support of violence.  If he can get the whole country to burn, all the better. It is a very new way to look at leadership.

The Bed Wetters freaked out after the convention and Trump’s impassioned claim that cabals of leftists were seeking to unleash the forces of evil (in his mind, black people, and immigrants and people who don’t like him) on those pristine and lily-white suburbs that are not pristine and lily-white anymore. He ought to see them when he tries to meet a real modern suburban woman.

It’s astounding to suggest that these women would go for his vile and loopy claim that these mystical demons of the left,  unleashed by Joe Biden, of all people,  will destroy their homes and rape and murder their wives and daughters.

He hasn’t met the Portland moms, either. They can take care of themselves.

I never imagined being modest and tepid would be a great campaign asset, but it is for Biden. He just isn’t believable as Attila The Hun. The least popular candidate in the primaries is turning out to be the best possible candidate for the campaign.

Decency and honor and love lives.

Perhaps a more subtle kind of race-baiting might have worked. But the Bed Wetters who want to survive this campaign might to well to deepen their perspective.

First, Biden has responded quickly and thoughtfully to Trump’s very public meltdown. Trump has become the Scream. Biden is the calm.  He is making it clear that he is opposed to all violence on either side and wants to refund and re-structure some police practices, not refund them.

He is going to Kenosha himself this week to demonstrate the art of dialogue and problem-solving.

Trump has left him a hanging curve in that he never even spoke to Jacob Blake’s family, and his “meeting” with the usual toadies and some stiff-necked and uncomfortable looking sheriffs did not suggest a leader who wanted to gather all sides and work out some solutions.

Trump has lost any chance of picking up a significant number of Black voters after this week.

The white voters in Wisconsin do not like violence in their towns and cities, but Trump is foolish to think they will automatically like him. By doing such a transparently self-serving,  divisive, and useless thing as rushing off to Kenosha for some photo-ops (again!), he left Biden’s way to come in and show people how it might be done.

Trump can no longer even pretend to be sincere about anybody else’s troubles. He just can’t do it.

Biden had also begun hammering Trump on his handling of the coronavirus and the chaos it had wreaked on kids, parents, and teachers, many of whom were bullied into the opening before they wanted to, or were ready too.

Trump nearly went off of his Tweet rocker when he read all those stories about his alleged “mini-stroke” last November. This will haunt him all throughout the campaign,  now he is the one who will be answering all those questions about his health.

Memorial Day weekend was the first big holiday after the lockdown. Many people – especially younger ones  – ignored masks and social distance and touched off a wave of coronavirus infections. It’s quite likely Labor Day will be worse, judging from all the parties shutting down colleges all over the country.

Trump has persuaded his followers that the virus is really just an over-hyped hoax, a Democratic plot to defeat him. I bet he sees flying saucers too. Infections in the Midwest are already rising rapidly. Here we go. Kenosha will be another two-day story soon enough.

Whenever I think of freaking out, I gather the facts.  Here is one from today, the latest CNN poll: