In my lifetime, I recall nothing that has frightened more people more deeply than the prospect of Donald Trump winning re-election on Tuesday. I’ve scoffed at this fear, questioned it, and finally learned to respect the depth and pain of it.

If you read anything about Mr. Trump’s life,  you will learn two tenets of his rise to fame and power.

One is the realization that there is no bad publicity.

Donald Trump is careful to make sure that he gets all of the attention all of the time, and that in itself is a source of great power.

People assume someone they see on TV every day must be important, and over time, he becomes overwhelming, like Big Brother in 1984.

Most politicians wouldn’t dare to go on TV during a pandemic and recommend Chlorox as a cure. Nobody even remembers that now.

The other cherished Trump attribute is fear – power is fear in many ways, and most people pay more attention to what frightens them than anything else in their lives.

One of the most chilling and important things about the Trump Era to me is the degree to which he frightens and angers women.

In him, they recognize and see things many men, especially white men, can’t or won’t see: the predator, the abuser, the misogynist, the grossly sexist and arrogant white male.

This is the type of man most women know all too well. They don’t want him around every day.

If he can no longer abuse women sexually safely, he can try to shame them and abuse them verbally, which he has done repeatedly, cruelly, and with great passion.

It worked for a few years; it is not working now. From journalists to ex-housewives to working and suburban women, women have had enough of him and are fighting back. They don’t like him, which is a matter of the heart and soul, not policy.

It seems the real issue in the 2020 campaign isn’t the pandemic or the economy; it’s the President’s unlikeability. Many Americans now – especially women – dislike him intensely and want him to go away.

It’s fitting that women are doing it because they are the cohort he has offended and insulted so continuously and deliberately.  And this is long after the tape showing him bragging about bragging women’s “pussies.”

The motto of this campaign should be America is changing; Donald Trump can’t.

He is too narcissistic to see it yet, but he has taken the floundering women’s revolution and lit it on fire; he brought it roaring back to life and given it focus and unity. How curious that at the moment, women are the thing he most fears, and the thing that will almost certainly defeat him next Tuesday.

I keep shaking my head in wonder as Trump, at event after event, begs for the support of women he has treated so shabbily and cruelly all of his life. Look in the mirror, Dude.

There is some truth in the world and some justice, after all.

Ironically, Trump is waking up much of the progressive world, which is increasingly powered by women, who can change, from MeToo to Black Lives Matter to the warriors for climate change, to the Suburban Women, and the Suburban Moms in Portland.

President Trump sees these women as dangerous and lawless, I see them as the front-line warriors of hope.

For decades, the far-right, backed by billionaires and giant corporations and the Republican Party,  have been plotting to take over Congress, the courts, and the White House.

They came pretty close.

Once the so-called left stops being afraid and self-conscious and traumatized and recovers its focus and mojo, that reality will really change. Starting most dramatically next Tuesday, it looks like.

The last smart report I read about the Supreme Court said that the most conservative justices are frightened about losing all of their credibility and getting stacked by Joe Biden next year.

Nobody had much reason to be afraid of progressives before; there are beginning to be some reasons now. For the first time in my life, there are serious consequences for humiliating, abusing, patronizing, and denying women their rights.

At the heart of much of the runaway fear I see and hear is the idea that Tuesday might bring a repeat of the 2016 catastrophe, when a philandering predator, deeply troubled narcissist, and con man won the Presidency.

No one, including him, ever imagined such a thing.

It was not only a shock; it was a trauma to more than half the country and to people who call themselves progressives, liberals, humanitarians, or Democrats.

It might have turned out better than we thought, but it turned out worse. Trump’s better angels fled under the pressure and spotlight he turned to the dark side, still powerful, still feared, but also increasingly known.

He was too busy playing Mussolini actually to run the country.

As a result, many Democrats show the literal symptoms more closely identified to combat trauma – PTSD – than politics. The trauma of 2016 is firmly embedded in their consciousness – panic, anxiety, disorientation.

But let’s take a few minutes to do some homework and see if it’s really true that 2020 is anything like 2016 and if all those fears are justified.

I want to thank Tim Alberta of Politico for thoroughly researching the differences between 2016 and now in his brilliant piece “One Last Funny Feeling About 2020“.  He did most of this research; I did some.

No one, least of all me, can say for certain what will happen on Tuesday. There is much to be concerned about. There is much to be hopeful and optimistic about—your call, not mine.

The point is 2016 was nothing like 2020 is. It’s time to kiss that ghost on the nose and send her home.

I believe Trump will lose because his country is weary of him and his insults and dramas and wants a change. We get tired of even the best hits after a few years; we like changing channels.

I don’t think it’s too much more complicated than that. He has tweeted and bloviated himself out of a job.

In 2018, an equally shocking Democrative wave 2018 followed Trump’s upset in 2016. America’s politics are volatile, and four years is a very long time.

Coalitions that bring victory in one year crumble a year or two later. Remember the Obama Golden Renaissance? The Tea Party?

Four years ago, Trump patched together a coalition of voters: the working-class whites, and suburban white women, both drawn to the idea that it was time to give someone who wasn’t a politician a chance to govern a divided country.

A businessman, perhaps, who might be willing to bargain to get things done. Recent polling suggests that Trump will lose the vote of suburban women by 25 points or more.

Trump’s 2016 coalition no longer exists.

Four years ago, only a third of the country believed America was on the right track. Today, only one-fifth of the country believes America is on the right track.

This time, they blame Trump, primarily due to his handling of the still raging Covid-19 epidemic.

Four years ago, Trump ran against an opponent who was intensely disliked by tens of millions of voters, and who was under very public FBI investigation for most of the general election.

Today Trump faces Joe Biden, an opponent who does not antagonize the right, who is personally well-liked and works hard to not further polarize the country.

Four years ago, voter turnout lagged in many parts of the country, especially in swing and democratic states, greatly boosting Trump.

Today voter-mobilization has already surpassed total vote counts in many states and cities. If Biden matches the record-breaking Democratic turnout of the 2018 mid-terms, he will win the Electoral College as well as the popular vote.

Myth has it that the polls in 2016 were inaccurate and completely missed the Trump rise.

In truth, most polls were quite accurate, at least on the national level. The final RealClearPolitics average projected Clinton winning the popular vote by 3.3 points; she won by 2.1 points.

If the average is off by a similar spread this year, reports Politico – that is, if Biden beats Trump by 7.1 percentage points nationally, instead of the 8.3 points he’s leading by the current averages – then he wins most if not all of the battleground states and carries more than 350 votes in the Electoral College.

In 2026, the polls missed some important things – especially the voting preferences of non-college-educated whites, the core of Trump’s support.

This year, the pollsters have revamped and adjusted their methodologies and are confident they are capturing a more accurate picture of Trump supporters.

Four years ago, the polling was nowhere near as dire for Trump as it is today.

In 2016, the final two weeks of the campaign were by far Trump’s most positive of the entire campaign. FBI Director Comey’s letter to Congress, which re-opened the Clinton e-mail investigation just 11 days before the election, shocked independent and moderate voters, many of whom voted for Trump.

The stodgy media, stunned and outmaneuvered by Trump, had no idea how to handle him and was paralyzed; they rarely challenged his lies, distortions, and smears. Lies are like weeds – unchallenged they grow and become true for many.

The last few weeks of this campaign have been disastrous for Trump.

He had one catastrophic debate appearance and one so-so one; he was diagnosed with Covid 19, took a ride around Walter Reed,  the virus came roaring back, especially in states Trump needs to win, he failed to deliver on a promised Covid recovery package and those women he finds so difficult to deal with, showed up at interviews and debates and press conferences and started to call out his many lies.

In addition, he spends his days spreading the virus at big rallies, and mostly preaching to the choir. He has no words for the rest of us.

Trump can no longer sit down for an interview without being exposed as a liar, tax cheat, ignoramus, and fraud, most often by tough women who don’t back down easily.

That isn’t the kind of publicity he likes or was used to after four years of having his boots licked on Fox News.

Mostly, he fled those interviews, our National Tweety Bird,  hurling insults to the interviewers  – almost all women – in the safety of his White House bedroom.

In 2016, Democrats thought Trump was a joke. So did most of the people who knew him.

Clinton’s campaign was arrogant, remote, and out of touch, much like the candidate herself. It turned out Brooklyn wasn’t a good place to put a national campaign headquarters. The staff was not exactly in sync with mainstream America.

Biden is mainstream America and even the people who won’t vote for him like him. He’s the proverbial nice guy who lives for family and never has a bad word to say about anybody, even when he should.

The Biden campaign has turned out to be the complete reverse of the Clinton campaign. It has connected deeply to state and local parties, delegated decision-making to people out in the country, not just in headquarters, and spent a lot of money and time in places like Detroit, Phoenix, and Charlotte.

At this time in the campaign four years ago, the battleground map was already locked into place. Trump had comfortable polling leads in states like Ohio, Iowa,  Georgia, and Texas, all of which he won by comfortable margins.

There was only one red state where Clinton campaigned aggressively – Arizona. Today, Trump is fighting for his life in all five of those states; his resources stretched thinner and thinner across a battleground map that’s gotten wider and wider.

The traumatized Trump-haters are convinced that a tight race means a surprise Trump comeback.

Maybe, but it could just as easily mean a surprise Biden surge. Trump is hemorrhaging votes from women, the elderly, and even some non-college-educated white men.

Trump has challenged many voters to remember the old saw, be careful what you wish for. To know Trump is not always to like him. In fact, for many of his early supporters, it is just the opposite.

His approval rating has never gone above 50 at any time in his presidency. Democrats are fired up as never before, they have tons of money, and the coronavirus has decided to join the campaign and endorse Joe Biden and strip Trump bare.

There is a huge difference between running as an outsider free to second guess and make things up than be the insider and target of second-guessing.

On top of all that, he has run perhaps the worst national political campaign in American history. Instead of trusting his loyal base to vote for him and search for more support, he’s done just the opposite.

He no longer speaks to or for anyone but his very loyal base.

It’s just not enough; it doesn’t matter how many people show up at his foolish rallies in their red hats and call for him to lock up his enemies.

He can’t do it that way alone, and he no longer seems to no longer know how to talk to anyone else.

When Trump was elected, many Americans hoped the new President would act like the savvy deal maker he pretended to be, making deals on one side and then the other on all sorts of populist initiatives, from China-bashing to infrastructure to health care, even gun control.

As the “non-politician,” he had the mandate to do what he wanted.

But deals were not what he really wanted.

He rejected any chance to bend or compromise or negotiate. He has a weird thing about dictators and a disturbing thing about Putin, about whom he has never said a critical word.

And who else in the whole world would fall in love with Kim Jong Il and trade love letters with him? Yuk.

Trump embraced the most divisive and socially conservative, deregulatory measures, and tax cuts for rich people like him; he ignored the left and even the center every time.

For me, one of his low points was meeting with the victims of the Parkland shooting and promising them he would do something to make schoolchildren safer.

He did do something; he went before the NRA and kissed their asses, then torpedoed any chance of even the most moderate gun control. Oh, well, said his loyal followers, he’s just being his cute old self.

His tweets were un-Presidential and uncouth, cruel, often completely dishonest, sometimes racist, prone to conspiracy theories, and kisses to white nationalists.

I’d be surprised to learn he won over a dozen more voters than he arrived with.

To hear him tell it, Trump’s great victory and legacy are to pack the Supreme Court with conservative justices. He did that early in the week.

But nobody is talking about that much; everyone is focused mostly on the pandemic as it’s spread through the heartland and about the election itself. Triumphs are short-lived in modern media or online.

There is always only one story in the world of Trump: him.

We’ll see. The Supreme Court changes people.  If the court really turns out to be an extension of the far right’s coup d’etat, it will lose all credibility and influence and, most probably, be altered or expanded.

The anti-abortion evangelicals who supported him so fervently in 2016 got what they wanted, which was not Trump, but Roe V. Wade most likely dismembered.

They don’t need him anymore. There are already some reports that they are not turning out to vote in record numbers.

I hope this helps to put aside in 2016 and help us deal with the difficult-enough reality of 2020.

There is a lot of work to do, and a lot to know, and none of it has anything to do with 2016.