But here is the scary part. What if Trump loses and won’t leave?

I generally don’t dwell in the future; I stick with the present. But for months now, President Trump has carefully planted the seed that he might not leave the office of the presidency willingly if he loses.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t see that happening, not unless the election is so tight that it is really not clear who has won. Trump seems intent on undermining the electoral process.

FiveThirtyEight published a thorough piece today explaining what happens if Trump refuses to accept a loss. People who are concerned might benefit from reading it.

I don’t see the purpose of panicking at this point.

And I go back to Mary Trump’s excellent book about her uncle. I don’t see him as someone strong enough or sharp enough to steal a national election, and I don’t see most Senators, as fawning as they have been, accepting a precedent like that.

But it is also clear that his narcissism is profound. He seems to not be able to imagine that he might be defeated, and it is easy to see him believing it impossible.

I know Mitch McConnel is much reviled in many progressive circles, but he is also an institutionalist regarding the Senate’s traditions. I don’t see him supporting a takeover of the government.

As politicized as it is, I also doubt the Supreme Court would agree to participate in something like that.

This is somewhat above my pay grade, but I don’t think stealing the election can work for Trump if Biden wins by a large margin and is pronounced a winner in early voting.

The country would be largely ungovernable if a Biden election victory were stolen, and I suspect he would not have the courage to try it.

I also imagine there are federal elements in the government that would step in to stop it.

Beyond that, there is a thread of mysticism in me. I just can’t picture him in the White House for four more years. I can’t see it. This country has great pride in its civic history. It would be hard to imagine him governing or Congress functioning through such a scenario.

If the election were very close, that might be a different matter. Democratic lawyers have been preparing for this scenario for months. We’ll have to see.  The best outcome for the country would be a clear victory across the country for one candidate or the other.

Trump is feverishly setting the stage for his supporters to mistrust the election results, and he obviously wouldn’t be doing that if he thought he was going to win. One step at a time, for me. We are not there yet, and may not ever be there.

All kinds of things can happen between then and now.

___

I’ve never seen an election like this because there’s never been an election like this.

The American experiment – a democracy were different factions come together for the public good – has been shaken to the core by a President eager to split the country in half and ignore and rewrite or ignore all the rules, traditions, and conventions that have existed for centuries.

With Lincoln and Roosevelt’s exception, no President has ever touched the public and private lives of more Americans so personally, relentlessly, and ruthlessly.

Everyone has been touched by Donald Trump, in one way or another, and we will all be sorting it out for a long time. And tremendous fear and mistrust are surrounding almost every aspect of the presidential campaign.

Here we are, six weeks away, and it seems that the future of America itself is on the ballot.  A pandemic, economic stagnation, savage wildfires, and volatile racial unrest on top of a crippled political system, paralyzed by partisanship.

What a long and hard year.

Where are we exactly in the presidential election?

There is a fair amount of shifting and shallying in some states but in general, this election has been remarkably consistent.

The vast majority of voters are immovable on both sides. Biden is still ahead and most of Trump’s frenzied attacks on him have fallen flat.

Two of them are still showing some promise: the idea that Biden is a socialist, dominated by socialists is sticking in some states, and discomfort with Black Lives Matter and the violent racial protests in some cities have rattled independents and moderate voters.

Still, most Americans trust Biden to handle these problems more than they trust Trump, and many Americans trust Biden, to tell the truth, more than they trust Trump.

This interesting thread about Trump’s followers pops up in the polling and interviewing: They don’t like what he says, but they like what he does.

It’s a fascinating campaign for sure, just as Trump will be a historical legend in American politics. He and his followers are precisely what Thomas Jefferson feared – an angry mob electing a demagogue.

Trump is a giver of sleepless nights, the whole country is up stewing about him I think.

Here it is, and we will know soon enough if the country will put up with it.

If Trump had announced that he didn’t believe in war and would stop our endless wars and remove us fro interminable and – for us – insoluble local and regional conflicts – I would have sent him a donation.

But if he hates wars so much, why seek $705.4 billion for the Defense Department next year and kiss the toes of some of the most murderous and militaristic dictators in the world?

From the first, I got the sense every single thing Trump did was transactional, not moral or ideological. Does anyone in their right mind really think Donald Trump loves African-American people? What is he talking about when he brags about how much Blacks love him?

In a sense, he has ended our endless wars and saved many American lives, and yet how he did, it seemed so irresponsible and reckless to me that it’s hard to give him any credit. In this sense, he is his own worst enemy.

Many people would have been willing to give him a chance, but he never once made me or anyone outside his original base of support feel that he was my or their President, concerned about me or others.

He had a lot of interesting instincts and ideas, and a lot of awful ones. But his manner – dishonest, arrogant, narcissistic, cruel, and lazy – all those golf trips, all that money to get to Mar-A-Largo – made it almost impossible for people outside of his fervent bubble to like him.

He is paying for that inability to connect now.

The other critical mistake I see him making is to continue in a way of governing that alienates suburban women – “housewives” he calls them – who object to his cruelty, insensitivity, and lack of empathy. Women want to see healing, not endless confrontation, and hostility.

Trump has misgauged the modern American women. They are not, for the most part, fearful housewives terrified of Black thugs invading their homes. They are smarter than that and tougher than that.

Remember the Portland moms, almost all of them were suburban “housewives.”

This is good news. Race-baiting has worked for Republicans for generations. America seems to be growing up a bit. Perhaps we really will have a national conversation on race.

Or perhaps it is possible to lie too much after all and be inflammatory and brazenly racist too often.

I think women have always sensed a predator in Trump, it is perhaps the most astounding turn in American political history for him to have survived a recording of him grabbing women’s “pussys” in the age of MeToo.

He never worked on healing that wound or apologizing for it. He has repeatedly shown contempt for strong women, especially those who challenge him.

This is also his own fault, and it will almost certainly cost him the election. The Greeks warned of hubris in their leaders. He wasn’t paying attention.

As he has been from the first, Joe Biden is ahead,  and Trump’s effort to terrify the electorate with racist fear-mongering and apocalyptic warnings are not paying off for him. Given that most of the violence has slowed or stop, it seems far-fetched to think it will save him.

Trump is running strictly on fear and grievance, not on policy. He is the Dark Prince, upsetting someone every time he speaks.

He has said almost nothing about his plans for a second term, refuses to accept the gravity of the pandemic, and is running as if Joe Biden were president – this week he blamed Biden for not authorizing enough masks, even though he has been out of the office for four years and was never in charge of masks.

In general, the race tends to break down among gender lines. White men of all ages who did not go to college support him, and he has some following among black and Latino men as well—lots of men like his macho posturing and his support of dominating women.

It seemed this campaign was largely the Last Stand Of The White Man, but it seems to be the Last Stand For Men Of All Collars.

Still, wealthy white people are the only people I know who are happy right now, with  Trump, and with the country. They see no social problems, no racism, no income inequality. Everything is just fine. Make America Great Again. Again.

Our country’s greatness is big news for Blacks, women, immigrants, the poor,  gays, and most Latinos.

Liberals, progressives, Puerto Ricans, women, young people, and Democrats support Joe Biden. Every day, the media is full of cautions and alarms about Trump trying to refuse to accept the election results.

There are signs that Trump’s refusal to take the pandemic seriously hurt his popularity among elderly white voters. He seems quite okay with killing them off at a horrific rate.

“I don’t want me or my husband to be the price that is paid for him to get re-elected,” said one former Trump lover now living in Florida.

And yes, the great pandemic, the elephant in the room, hovers and looms, I can almost feel it preparing to return with a roar.

God help those saps who went to those rallies and breathed on one another.

Trump is acting the role of the desperate man. He seems to have decided that his best chance of hanging on is to provoke a court fight a/la Bush and Gore and hope some of his hand-picked federal judges bail him out.

The notion terrifies those blue people. But if the current polling numbers hold up, his defeat will be too large and too many states to pull that off.

It looks like most of the country – a clear if not overwhelming majority – are wary of our President and no longer trust him or believe much of anything.

They are sick of all the noise and drama. And of a Congress that has lost its way.

Every part of our civic life is stuck in partisan quicksand, nothing seems able to bring the two sides together, the old notions of patriotism and common ground are gone. Nothing can get done.

So the election is important. We can expect at least one half of the country to be angry and miserable and feel cheated either way and it seems likely that Joe Biden’s real challenge won’t be the election, but what comes after.

It’s remarkable to live in a country where millions of people really believe that Joe Biden is a socialist under the control of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

We should be so lucky. This is the stuff of the White Rabbit in Wonderland, of the dystopian novel, of the world’s greatest and most revealing Reality TV show.

Trump excites his followers and keeps them engaged. He is the most overwhelming political presence in a century, if not all time. I am grateful to have been given a chance to write about him.

The Democrats have chosen a different path. Biden is projecting a calm and gentler and more traditional political leader; the kind people elected Trump to chase away. He makes Democrats all across the country nervous by spending so much time safely in  Delaware, but I’m afraid I have to disagree with them; they are the “bed-wetters.’

There is a lot of buyer’s remorse among moderate whites and suburban women who voted for Trump. I wouldn’t get my hopes up for the debates one way or the other. Like conventions, people like to watch them, but they rarely win or decide on elections.

To me, Biden’s major challenge is to show up and be coherent, which he seems to have no trouble doing. Like most men on the cusp of 80, he is slower and less charismatic than most presidential candidates.

Trump has worked so hard portraying him as senile and mentally incompetent that he won’t need to do much to look better than expected. I’ve seen him a dozen times on tape the last few weeks, and I doubt he will have much trouble holding his ground.

I don’t look for him to snap, crackle and pop.  Most people have made up their minds.

The respected website FiveThirtyEight, my own personal campaign Bible, reports that we are now in the 2020 election cycle’s home stretch. Although Joe Biden’s lead in national polls has narrowed to seven percentage points, he remains favored to win the election because they have several high-quality polls that contain mostly good news for him.

States like Minnesota, Arizona, and Wisconsin show especially strong numbers for Bid, but the site, like most media, cautions against ruling Trump out just jet.

They say that he has a one in four chance of pulling off an upset in states like Florida and North Carolina, where Trump has managed to narrow the gap considerably.

But still and after the most vicious attacks on a presidential candidate in  memory, including Hilary Clinton, 528 says the same thing it has been saying:

“Biden is favored to win the election. We simulate the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often. This sample of 100 outcomes has Trump winning 24 out of 100 times, Biden wins 76 out of 100.

No president had ever lost an election when his numbers were so high six weeks away from the election, but then, no candidate has ever been this ruthless or dishonest a campaign. Trump is a powerful and ruthless leader, and he doesn’t quit.

His campaign, quite surprisingly, is said to be running out of money, and Biden has tons of it now. When the advertising is urgently needed, it won’t be there for Trump, but Biden’s campaign chest is getting bigger by the day.

I’ve felt and said for months now that essentially, the election is cast in stone. Those who love Trump will love him through to the end, and those who hate Trump are the real architects of the election outcome.

As a politician and leader, Trump’s limits have been brought into focus by each of the crises affecting the country. His bungling of the pandemic, even before the Woodward tapes, has been a disaster for him.

He has no plan for reviving the economy other than ignoring the pandemic and wishing it to magically disappear.

He has intensified and stoked the country’s racial divisions to win the election. He has corrupted and brought into suspicion some of our most trusted governmental institutions.

His insistence that he knows more than all the scientists about climate change is just insane against the backdrop of half the country on fire, and the other half underwater.

When Attorney General Barr compared federal coronavirus lockdowns to slavery, he reminded all of us once again what is at stake. What is the point of Barr going rogue now? Trump already has the angry far-right votes.

Why continue to alienate all of the others?

What is surprising to me is that no one in the Trump campaign seems able to shut up, even for a few days.

Does Attorney General Barr, who compares lockdowns to save lives to slavery,  not know that there has not been a national lockdown since the virus began? And does he have no inkling just how offensive that statement is at this time?

Trump doesn’t need a Mini-Me right now, he needs to persuade the few remaining people in the middle that he is sane and rational and has some good plans for pulling all of us out.

He doesn’t have any plans, good or bad.

And he is neither sane nor rational.

In Trump’s orbit, everyone seems to be living in their own Fantasy Land, perhaps already planning for the next fight, since this one seems almost hopelessly lost as the nation begins to vote in many states.

It’s hard for people to deny reality when they are running and swimming and fighting for their lives, over and over again. Those stories coming out of the Pacific Northwest are haunting and powerful.

Political strategists have been waiting for months to see Trump shift gears, as he did during the Republican convention, highlighting what he says is his true and compassionate nature.

Empathy Trump didn’t last long. Ruthless and Unhinged Trump is back with a vengeance.