From Mary, my letter of the day: “Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, and spiritual writer, writes about the concept of Order, Disorder, and Reorder. Humans grow by passing from a place of relative Order through sometimes painful and chaotic times of Disorder, and then finally to Reorder–a place of enlightenment, resurrection, transformation. This is often a repeated cycle. Certainly, it has been for many of us personally, but also in our country. I agree that in this current period of Disorder in our society, we will emerge from this troubling time a transformed, better country and people.”

Thanks for the letter, Mary; this is my life, and this is my belief. And Richard Rohr is one of my favorite spiritual authors.

With just about eight weeks to go before the election, I think it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and make my own predictions. I follow the polls and some news outlets,  but my predictions come from my heart and mind, the two mainstays of my soul.

Donald Trump is obviously not my cup of tea as a President, I wouldn’t lie about that. But I’m not writing this out of hate or bias: I was trained to step back and sniff the wind, and that’s what I’m doing.

That’s how we used to do it.

Mostly, I rely on my instincts and the good work of people I know and trust. Partisan journalists are not any more reliable than partisan politicians or voters, they can’t be trusted to be objective in any way.

I choose my own labels. I guess I am a bit old-fashioned. I think lying is wrong, even if you do some good things. Being cruel is wrong. Hurting the poor and the vulnerable is wrong. Demeaning women and “grabbing their pussies” is wrong. Calling Mexicans “rapists” is wrong, and so is hiding from and then politicizing a lethal pandemic.

For me, that doesn’t make up for having some good ideas. But still, truth is truth, facts matter.

When I was a political writer, I felt I always had my finger on elections; I was rarely wrong about my sense of things, I loved talking to all sides.

I was completely off about 2016; as a sometime member of the working-class elite (no college diplomas for me), I missed other working-class whites’ unhappiness. I couldn’t imagine Donald Trump getting elected president of the United States.

I was wrong, I missed what happened and also what was coming.

On one end, the women’s revolution was rising. On the other, the Last Stand Of The White Man was boiling over. Finally, they had a leader with some power.

And inevitably, they collided. This election is their battleground. We all know the stakes. My money is on the women.

Most of us grasped l the hidden meaning of Make America Great Again. It meant going back to 1850. Climate change was a hoax; science was a myth; women should never be nasty, Blacks should stay in their ghettos; immigrants should stay away, the poor were to blame for their misery, the rich need to get richer.

What the slogan really meant was Make America White Again.  That is necessary for all of those other things to be true.

Unfortunately for what has become a white nationalist movement, it is way too late. In a few years, white people will be a minority in the United States for the first time.

This election will mark the real resurrection and renewal. All those women in Congress and medicine and law are not going away. A Black woman is even running as a vice-presidential candidate.

Our country is a clock that cannot be turned back. Only the blind can fail to see it.

I considered Trump’s election both a wake-up call and an aberration then, I still do.

Every day people message me to ask what I think will happen.

Of course, I don’t know for sure that I am not a psychic, but I have been working hard to pay more attention, talk to people, listen to people, and follow the intelligent and non-partisan parts of the news more closely.

I feel pretty good about what I have written so far; if I am wrong, I will be happy to show up daily to take the heat. Anyone who never makes a mistake is not a human being.

So here goes.

I’ve said from the beginning that I believe Donald Trump will lose the presidential re-election.

I’ve never wavered in that, and a slow of recent and high-quality polling supports that idea. I believe it mostly because I see that Trump is incapable of conducting a smart, resilient, and focused campaign. He is really only capable of disrupting it.

The irony is that he could have so easily won. He is just too damaged to do that, it requires the kind of thinking and vision he just doesn’t possess.

In 2016, he was somehow the right candidate for that transitional time. Most of us didn’t realize how angry and frustrated rural America was and how much distress they experienced.

Now we know. I see that as the primary lesson of 2016. The other thing we didn’t know was just how disliked Hilary Clinton was. It may or may not be fair, but it is the truth.

The tsunami that we now see as the women’s revolution was beginning to really make itself felt when Trump became president – Me Too, Black Lives Matter, the suburban “housewives,” the suburban moms, all the moms – were brought to life by Trump’s cruelty, narcissism, and history of admitted – even bragged about – sexual harassment.

He has turned an ascending movement into an Army, and it is about to crush him. He is just out of touch with everyone but pissed off young and old white men.

Twelve credible women have now come forward to claim our President harassed them, and while our media and political system have moved on, many women have not.

A distinct majority of Americans say every week and in every poll that even when they think he has done some good things, they will never again believe a word he says, and they do not trust him to govern at this time.

That’s now where any sane politician would ever want to be, no how loyal one’s base.

Four years ago, Harvey Weinstein would never have been convicted of rape or gone to jail. Four years later, Donald Trump will not now or never again win a Presidential Election.

His handling of the virus, his brazen race-mongering, his politicizing of the post office, the CDC, his lack of any coherent plan for anything, his awful race-baiting, the politicized effort to create a safe vaccine right now, his epidemic lying (I think his nickname should be the Lyin’ King, are you listening, Joseph, Jr?)

The country got some good hard lessons; we will be paying for them a good long while. But I believe when all is said and done, the dam will have held, our civic impulses are strong and deep.

It is sad to see the Republican Party so damaged and transformed into a bunch of groveling toadies; the historians all say we need both parties to be healthy so the country can be balanced. John McCain was more of a hero than I thought.

I believe that Joseph Biden Jr. will win an election with enough state victories and a large enough vote to fend off Trump’s hysterical efforts to make a case that the election was fraudulent.

The latest polls suggest that the Democrats are slight favorites to retake the Senate, and I believe that will happen by a narrow margin, perhaps even 50-50, with Kamala Harris the tying vote.

But I don’t say this because of poll results. I believe elections like this are really all about waves. The Tea Party caught a wave when Barack Obama was president.

Donald Trump caught a wave in 2016.

Now, he has created an even bigger wave, a mass rejection of  Trumpism – a tsunami maybe – that Joseph Biden Jr. is skillfully riding, mostly by just being different.

Trump can talk all he wants about Biden hiding out in his basement, but it is one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen a politician do.

Biden understood that one way or another, the real issue for Americans is Trump or Not Trump. The pandemic laid bare Trump’s great weaknesses as a leader or strategist or national comforter.

Biden allowed Trump to campaign against himself, And boy did he ever.

Today, Johns Hopkins University reported that the number of daily new U.S. coronavirus cases have risen on each of the last five days for the first time since late July. This is what the doctors have said they most fear as the flu season approaches.

The new cases average about 39,700 over a week, and that average is rising. This is the news Donald Trump least wants to hear so close to the election.

He bungled the pandemic, he has no real plan for the economy, and half the country says they wouldn’t accept or take a vaccine if he came up with one tomorrow. His handling of our racial trauma is to create more racial trauma.

He has been invariably nasty and evasive. And he is a compulsive liar.

He manages to be both hateful, disingenuous, and incoherent at the same time. He is trapped by his addiction to name-calling. The names just don’t stick any more, they aren’t new, and they aren’t fun.

He has become the bane of the reality TV show: stale and predictable. His MAGA rallies are almost painfully desperate, not exciting.

“President Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus epidemic has imperiled both his own re-election and his party’s majority in the Senate,” reported the New York Times this morning.”

Republican lawmakers in crucial states like Arizona, North Carolina, and Maine have fallen behind their Democratic challengers amid broad disapproval of the president.

Olivia Troye, until August a senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force, told the Washington Post yesterday that the administrations’ response to the virus cost lives and that she will vote for Joseph Biden Jrs, this fall because of her experience at the White House.

She said Donald Trump showed a “flat out disregard for human life,” and cared only about the economy and his own re-election.

This is the tenor of this campaign, every day we learn something that would have knocked out any other presidential candidate in our history, but which seems to slide right off of Trump.

But don’t be fooled. All of these things take their toll, energy matters, so does momentum in a political campaign. You can’t knock Trump out with a single blow, but he is dying a death of a thousand cuts.

I am beginning to see what Mary Trump has been telling us, in her book and interviews. Bob Woodward also suggested that after 18 different interviews, Trump doesn’t really grasp the difference between truth and lies.

More and more, it seems this is something of a disorder for him, as it really is not to his advantage to lie so openly and so incompetently – he is telling lies that can be so easily disproven, even denying he said things that are recorded on tape, that can be so easily viewed.

What I see and feel is that a wave is building.  Yes, the race is tightening in some key states, and yes, it is theoretically possible for him to win in the Electoral College.

But day by day, this becomes increasingly unlikely.

The pandemic is still killing hundreds of people a  day and is spreading rapidly in at least 14 states. And Trump still insists it will just go away and besides, a safe vaccine will be ready in a few weeks.

This is governance by delusion, and it is frightening people a lot more than guiding them.

For me, the numbers are clear and continuous and steady. Biden is leading almost everywhere he needs to lead, and where he is not leading, he is often gaining and threatening.

His lead is not enormous but is solid and widespread.

I do not believe Trump will steal the election or refuse to leave the office if defeated. That would create a shitstorm far above his capacity to handle.  Any kind of governance would be impossible.

It just doesn’t look like the election will be that tight. And panic is never a useful political tool.

There is an air of inevitability about Joseph Biden Jr. And Kamala Harris, and about the people supporting them. Trump had his time, and he blew it,  his time has passed.

It isn’t so much that people love Biden; it is more that more and more people have come to hate Trump. And Biden is the almost perfect anti-Trump. He is nice and civil and calm.

There is also a deeply spiritual component for me in all of this. Rohr is correct; we grow – I have certainly grown – by passing from a place of relative order and comfort to a painful and chaotic time of disorder.

And now, and soon, to a place of re-order, of enlightenment, resurrection, transformation.

I believe with Mary that we will emerge from this very painful time a transformed, better country and people.

Many of us have been reaffirmed in our appreciation and respect for science and what it has done and continues to do for us. Anyone who owns a car or truck ought to be able to see it. The fires and floods and pandemics will make the rest of us see it.

In the past few years, we have learned that women are taking their rightful place in society and the world order, whether white men like it or not. We see that Black Americans are demanding a reckoning for centuries of suffering and slavery and racism.

This is the wrong time for us to have a President who rejects science,  cannot feel others’ pain, and flames racial hatred rather than douses it with empathy and compassion.

The simple way to look at it is that times have changed, and they always do, and the survivors in politics and life are the people who can change with it. For all the polling and punditry, that’s what this election is really all about.

This is the wave I’m talking about. It’s fine that the polls are all saying the same thing. But people don’t need a poll to be tall them what they can see or feel.

This is not a time of fear for me, but a time of hope and faith. We have a lot of good work to do, and I’m not waiting for an election to start doing it.