I decided to take the holiday weekend off as a political writer; I wanted to see how it would look to me after a few days away from the news. I wanted to see what stood out.

When I came back today, it struck me that this campaign, perhaps the most significant presidential election in more than a century, is not really much of an election campaign after all, despite the media’s almost desperate efforts to hype it up.

When I close my eyes, I hear a great hiss, which is the sound of the air going out of Donald Trump’s great balloon,  and his desperate and pathetic effort to stay in the White House.

Labor Day traditionally marks the kickoff of the real campaign; the one voters pay attention to. But this campaign feels static and predictable, uninspiring and grinding on Trump’s side, despite the media’s almost hysterical efforts to make it seem close and thrilling.

The campaigns still look to me like two old boxers, staggering around the ring. But in so many political ways, Biden is beating Trump’s brains out. He is articulate, compassionate, cogent, and my blood pressure doesn’t go up when he talks.

Maybe it’s a mental health issue, after all.

Trump’s campaign is no more thrilling than listening to a foghorn blow in your ear two or three times every day. I so enjoyed not hearing that sound over the holiday weekend.

Most striking is the failure of his prime campaign tool – The Big Lie.

His primary message, that hordes of Black people will storm the suburbs and rape and pillage is a big dud. I think the commentators don’t get it.

People don’t like it and aren’t buying it, especially those “housewives” he patronizes and underestimates. That is an important message for America.

The bright spot is that the Biden campaign is sharp, well run, quick to react proportionately, staying focus on pandemic and the race-baiting.

What can I say? Trump is our National Asshole; you can count on him saying something frightening, false,  racist, or disturbing every day, often more than once.

I guess the 2016 campaign got stuck in his consciousness; he can’t think of anything but to do it again, often in the very same words.

H.L. Mencken was wrong. Americans often do stupid things, but they are not that stupid.

What a dreadful campaign he is running. This was striking for me.

The “brilliant” businessman with six bankruptcies under his belt has spent his own campaign dry and is struggling to raise money for the final critical weeks, even as our national debt is higher – eight trillion dollars – than at the end of World War II.

Maybe he and the U.S. can declare bankruptcy at the same time.

The master of the cruel and nasty insult seems to have lost some of his magic hurt juice. He calls his opponent “stupid,” “senile,” “corrupt,” “radical,” an “enemy of God.”

Feh, say most Americans.

None of it seems to stick. The master of nastiness seems to have run out of venom, or maybe, as is more likely, people are just sick of him and want him to go away. It’s time to cancel his show for the next season.

So many people are vaccinated from his hatefulness by boredom and grievance fatigue. They’ve just heard it too many times, and  Trump doesn’t really have another note.

I don’t see any evidence Americans give a shit which part of the White House he is using for his campaign. They want the pandemic to go away so they can get their lives back and protect their children.

The classier his backdrops, the more banal and crude his statements. I see those white columns get stained.

The polls, more thorough, cautious, and sophisticated than ever, show that basically, the race has not changed much in a  month.

This is the longest static polling period in the history of presidential campaign polling.

I am not moved to evoke the drama of Hilary Clinton’s failed campaign, the ghost of progressives everywhere. I’m sick of hearing about it. This year, Hilary Clinton Doesn’t Matter. Move on.

Clinton is nothing like Joe Biden, his campaign is not nearly as constipated as hers was, and America has changed more than Donald  Trump can see or imagine. We don’t have to wonder what he is like. We know and we know and we know.

My neighbor, who loves Trump, says he bear to listen to him any more. He forbids his children to watch him, he doesn’t want them to start lying about their homework.

“Can’t they just shut him up,?” he wonders.

Well, no.

What sort of candidate says horrific things about veterans and military commanders and expects to be the commander-in-chief?

Unlike the President, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Magazine, has a reputation for integrity and diligence in his reporting.

I love watching how Trump reacts to being cornered.

Absolutely nobody believes a word he ever says anymore, even the people who love him.

The deeper the wounds, the bigger the lies. For the leader of a government, and a politician seeking re-election, that is just plain dumb.

If Jeffrey Goldberg says this story isn’t over,  you can bank on it; the story is not over. And if Trump loses veterans, he loses.

People trust Joe Biden more than they trust Trump and like Joe Biden more than they like Trump. Most people see him as more competent than President Trump.

I am surprised to see just how bad a campaign the allegedly wily and invincible Trump is running.

If he really loved that economy so much, he would knock down the pandemic as so many other countries are doing, and get his booming economy back. Ironically, he has made himself the greatest obstacle to his strongest political asset.

The longer the pandemic goes on, the poorer his already bad chances are.

That fact that he can’t pivot on so dire an issue tells us he is not right in the head. He just can’t do it, mostly because he decided not to months ago and can’t stomach being wrong.

Trump sees only one kind of Americans through a very small prism and caters to them relentlessly and absolutely. This is tragic in so diverse a country.

I can’t imagine he’s attracted a hundred new voters in the last couple of months.

Trump has not only awakened Biden and spooked him into being an effective, disciplined, and focused candidate; he is proving Trump’s niece Mary right every single day. He is a broken man, incapable of strategy or wisdom.

Even when he is speaking from a teleprompter, his campaign shows us a small, angry, frightened, and increasingly disturbed person. Use your nose. He has the smell of doom all over him for the first time in his spoiled and protected life.

It is chewing him up.

And please don’t message me to whine that you hope this is true. If you can’t or don’t see it for yourself, you’ll get nothing of value from me.

The most telling story of this campaign week was the African-American Church Elders of Rochester, who used themselves as human shields during the protests there over the death of Daniel Prude.

This kind of story completely undercuts Trump’s central argument – that Blacks and Democrats are wolves.

Like Portland’s moms, the elders came to stand between the police and the protesters and once again showed the country leaders can heal, not just provoke and divide.

Stories like this are full of hope, and that’s another thing our President can’t offer us – hope. The White House is a barren place right now.

All over America, women are standing up and speaking out, from moms to elders to protesters and demonstrators. And they all seem united by one common issue: getting rid of Trump.

To me, Trump looks like the money-crazed poacher about to get run over by a herd of vengeful elephant mothers.

As Mary Trump pointed out in her book, he clearly does not see it coming.  Defeat is simply not comprehensible to him. He is incapable of seeing himself failing or in trouble or needs to change.

Change is surrender to him, something the Great Men Of History never believe.

His lies and conspiracy theories come so fast and furious that almost no one really understands what he is talking about, or can even remember it from one day to another.

His working-class, white nationalist and angry followers are a wake-up call for this weary country, reflecting our angst and confusion.

But they will lose as many voters as they attract in the American of 2020.

Trump can’t see this either.

More than anything the country is hungry for some relief, for some normalcy, for some decency. It surprises me to say it – I was never a fan of his – but Joe Biden feels like the perfect candidate for American right now.

All he has to be is himself.

So here we are. President Trump the candidate insists on ignoring the one-story most Americans care about – especially as millions of parents and teachers struggle to cope with a leaderless and frightened country as school opens up.

The scientists predict a big round two coming with the coronavirus because the government has blown yet another chance to contain it. Why on earth would this man’s poll numbers go up?

Trump still lives with Barack Obama embedded in his racist head; he is still running against him. His campaign gets worse and worse, angrier, colder, more and more hateful and more unsettled as Biden’s gets stronger, more confident, and better funded.

When Trump is confronted with his hateful rhetoric about veterans and soldiers, he responds by attacking his Generals and Pentagon appointees as war profiteers.

And this is his defense!

Since he doesn’t seem to be an idiot, I am puzzled about why he imitates one ever day.

I can only go back to my earliest observations; they hold up. Mary nailed it.  He is not well; he is not rational; he cannot run the kind of focused, disciplined campaign he needs to run.

He is unfit to be President, or even run for President.

Progressives and liberals are obsessed with 2016, even though it has very little relevance to American in 2020.

In the midst of the greatest surge in the modern history of the Woman’s Revolution, Trump continues to demean, belittle and insult every strong and accomplished woman who crosses his path, no matter their color.

He has allowed himself to become Feminism’s Arch Enemy and American women’s Prime Symbol of White Male Misogyny even as the women’s movement crests all around him.

In the next days and weeks, more Generals and aides will come out and tell more stories of his horrific insults of soldiers who fight in the wars men like him create for them.

Next week, Bob Woodward’s new book about Trump – Rage – will come out, giving him more things to defend himself about. He will not be happy about it. Joe Biden will love it.

You can also look forward to health care once again, becoming a dominant issue in the country’s congressional campaigns.

Health care defined the 2018 midterms with Democrats pounding away at a consistent message about defunding Obamacare, which the Trump administration has gone to court to kill.

Once again, the issue is protecting pre-existing conditions and lowering drug prices. What a wonderful issue to campaign on during a pandemic.

Health care is the perfect issue for Democrats to use in the wake of the still raging coronavirus. Once again, President Trump is on the wrong side of an issue millions of Americans take more seriously than ever.

Biden has so many good ways to go after Trump, it’s hard to know which one to go after first. And he now has the money to do it. While Trump gets weaker, Biden gets stronger.

In fact, there is very little for Donald Trump to be happy about. There is a lot for people of good faith and hope to look forward to.

A week or two after Rage comes out, look for the pandemic to rise as a post-Labor Day hangover and once again expose his callousness and incompetence.

Manna from Heaven for Joe Biden. In the week after that, the first presidential debate where Joe Biden will exceed all expectations for him because Trump promised us he doesn’t even know where he is and has lost his mind.

What I am most excited about it is the dawning realization that truth does matter. Trump’s lies are the hallmark of his presidential campaign. But Gandhi was right. Truth and love always triumph over demagogues in time.

Always. I was beginning to wonder if the truth would ever come back to us. You can’t lie to people all of the time. It does catch up with you.

Yesterday, using a White House Portico to conduct his campaign rallies, Trump said Joe Biden was a “stupid person” who didn’t know where he was when he got up in the morning.

That is really not a smart argument to make for a man who can’t utter a coherent sentence. Biden will look brilliant just for breathing.

If he should stutter, the whole country will stutter with him.

But then, this is not a smart campaign by the incumbent. It isn’t really a campaign at all.

You can look forward to Biden’s revenge on September 29, the first debate.