So here’s what you need to know on November 12, 2020. Stay Calm. Be Strong. It will be over – at least this phase –  on or around November 20.

This is not Germany in the ’30s; Donald Trump is not nearly as smart as Adolf  Hitler.

Here’s some perspective.

It was tough today not to jump on the Donald  Trump Crazy Train, but I managed: walk the dogs, wrote, food shopped,  took some photos, made some phone calls, rode at the gym.

I see that the media coverage is entering the twilight zone, full of dire, even hysterical warnings about the barbarians storming the gate, seizing power, unleashing the Army on us.

What Trump does is lie. What the media does is shriek.

Watching the news for a few minutes was like watching one of those horror movies where shrieking zombies are chasing our hero through the woods, and he suddenly finds an open door and runs through it, slamming the door and relishing the safety and silence – for now.

Take it easy out there. A lot of troubling stuff is happening, as predicted, but the stormtroopers are not at the door or close.

If you forget everything else,  remember this:

Donald Trump is a coward and a bully, both of them equal parts of the same thing. He is ill-equipped to solve his own problems or strategize his own solutions. He is at the moment, scaring half the world to death. He is also making a complete ass out of himself.

In the final analysis, that is someone to pity, not to fear.

In his own unpredictable way, Trump is quite predictable.

He never plans, has no strategic program, acts and behaves impulsively, lives in fantasy and unreality, and when a hard decision has to be made, he always seems to make the wrong one.

The Republicans in Washington are horrified by what Trump is doing to the Pentagon last week and is planning on doing to the National Security system. They don’t care, really, how afraid everyone else is about where the country is heading.

Because they know it will be over soon, and they even know when. Mitch McConnell is nothing if not shrewd, and he knows that Donald Trump will not be President on January 21, 2021. All he has to do to win his Senate majority is hold things together for a week or so.

Defense and national security is Republican turf, and Trump is halfway to destroying both of those traditionally sacrosanct Republican institutions. They are said to be outraged by what Trump is doing and realize that this is not quite the right time to defy him in public.

They also know Biden won and is now the President-elect.

Republican senators are mostly (not entirely) staying silent now because they don’t want to anger Trump in advance of the Georgia recount and Senatorial elections there.

McConnell has gotten them pretty far and through a lot of storms. They trust him. But they won’t trust him forever.

A least four of them have called for President-Elect Biden to start getting the daily intelligence briefings new Presidents always get. Trump has refused. If he keeps up his pout, there will be more senators speaking out.

To Republicans, damaging democracy is just the breaks. But not getting a security briefing? That is unthinkable.

McConnell has no blood in his body, just a calculator in his head that is always stuck on 51 – the votes he needs to control the Senate.

If McConnell’s party loses those two Georgia seats, he loses the Senate majority and much of his power in Washington. Biden has a wide-open path to change the power dynamic in Washington.

If Trump is angry, they fear, he won’t help them win and his Georgia followers will stay home.

Yes, the stakes are high, and yes, it is tense and difficult.

But once again, we are not at the Apocalypse, and the soldiers are not on the march, and the Republican Party is not committing treason, although sedition maybe.

The  Republic is still standing and will be standing a good while longer. By and large, our civic center and structure are intact and holding, even with those dreaded new conservative judges.

As most of you may know,  Georgia’s two senate seats are back on the ballot for a January runoff since nobody got more than 50 percent of the vote.

The state itself is now counting at least a million ballots by hand.

The Georgia Secretary of State is an honest Republican under fierce pressure from Republicans to find voter fraud to nullify the election there, which Biden has won by a narrow margin, thanks mostly to Stacey Abrams.

Trump is reported to be profoundly depressed by Biden’s victory, which he could hardly believe.

In his grandiose mind, Biden could not possibly have beaten him without cheating. Biden is the biological opposite of Trump, whose ego is fragile as a crystal glass in an earthquake. This is important.

If Trump is, in fact, a malignant narcissist, which seems truer by the day, then his mind is scrambled with the unbearable idea of rejection and defeat.

It is complicated for him to comprehend it, and harder still for him to accept it. He will need some time; I don’t say that out of sympathy but out of reality. It won’t be simple or easy.

Even though some party donors are said to be offering up to $1 million for evidence of widespread voting fraud, there really doesn’t seem to be any, and one judge after another is laughing Republican lawyers out of court.

“He’s like the Goodyear Blimp with a slow leak,” one aide told a reporter, “it will take a while for him to deflate.”

But deflate, he will. There is no path to victory for Donald Trump, and for the first time in his life, the people he has summoned to bail him out can’t. America, for all it’s many very public flaws, is bigger than anyone demagogue.

Trump, who ordered these lawsuits, is said to be suffering from them. He keeps losing every day. And losing credibility as well.

It’s not going his way. To Trump, Biden is a weak, old and boring man without the energy, toughness, or charisma to have beaten him honestly.

His two somewhat hapless sons, Eric and Don Jr., are urging him to fight on forever and never give up. They do not strike me as deep strategists or thinkers.

Daughter Ivanka said to be the true love of  Trump’s life,  is said to be gently and carefully urging her father to move on,  to consider the family business, which Don and Eric have nearly driven into the ground.

She also has her own ambitions, she would like the Trump legacy to be nobler than conspiring to destroy our democracy on the way out the door.

Trump sees the world leaders – even his pals – rushing to congratulate Biden, who is skillfully talking about the pandemic all day while Trump fights and feuds with Fox News (just a spat, not a divorce).

This is a man who watches TV all day, but this time, it’s no fun. In the midst of an awful pandemic, he has time to whine about Fox News in a tweet.

Everyone is calling Joe Biden the President-Elect now; Trump won’t permit the federal government to begin the power transition.

According to the people around Trump, he is beginning sporadically to talk about his life after the White House. No one working around him believes he will try to seize or keep power after January 20.

I often go back and re-read Mary Trump’s wonderful book Too Much And Never Enough. She was right about Trump being dangerous, but also right about his crippling flaws.

And if you read niece Mary’s book, you can be reassured that Trump does not have the emotional structure or strategic mind necessary to pull off a coup d’etat in the world’s biggest and most powerful democracy.

“Donald’s problems are accumulating,” she wrote in her book, “because the maneuvering required to solve them, or to pretend they don’t exist, has become more complicated, requiring many more people to execute the coverups.  Donald is completely unprepared to solve his own problems or adequately cover his tracks. After all, the systems were set up in the first place to protect him from his own weaknesses, not help him negotiate the wider world.”

And right now, the wider world is gathering outside his door.

A coup would be a shitstorm beyond his ability to navigate or survive. He is nowhere near tough enough or strong enough for that.

And it would not do the  Republicans in the Senate much good either.  They are hated enough as is.

Trump does not strategize; he makes plans for nothing; he wings it. The world’s best autocrats are much better organized than that.

The Republicans are bowing and scraping and pandering to Trump, but after January 20, they may not need him very much.

They’ve been hiding from and shuddering over his crazy tweets for years, pretending to reporters that they didn’t see them. They are a sober group of mostly uptight old white men. Trump is their worst nightmare, if they get the chance to shove him over the side, they’ll do it in a flash, and he knows it.

McConnell expects to control the Senate, win a lot of races across the country, take back control of the House of Representatives in 2024, and he will do everything possible to block Biden’s agenda.

At the moment, the only obstacles to victory in the Georgia runoffs are Stacey Abrams and Donald Trump, and he can’t control either one of them.

The Republicans don’t need a constitutional crisis freaking out the whole world every day, calling attention to their increasingly authoritarian positions, and getting blamed for every one of the Covid-19 deaths that happen from now on.

It would be helpful to understand the mind of Mitch McConnell. He is not a political radical or a person who cares nothing for his country. He is a lifelong creature of the Senate, much like Joe Biden, and everything he does must be considered in that context.

He has as much charisma or warmth as a Gekko, but he never forgets his role as a Senate leader, which is what he wanted for his whole life.

Until November 20, McConnell will not say or do anything to anger or undercut the President or upset his supporters. That is the day Georgia will have to certify the election to the federal government. That has no real, lasting significance for Biden, who wins without it.

Although he would dearly love the Democratic Senatorial candidates to win, he needs those two votes.

But the date has enormous significance for Trump, who will get yet another humiliating rebuff and slap in the face. After that, there is not much elsewhere for him to go.

I can’t tell you how little respect I have for Trump’s strategic moves. Here he has whined and bitched and raged about mail fraud in Georgia for weeks; he insists the state was stolen from him.

He has invested a fortune of other people’s money and time harassing the State’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who Trump endorsed as an honest and outstanding public servant a couple of years ago.

By all accounts, Raffensperger is an ideologue, but an honest one.

So he and his staff are counting the ballots one by one, the most labor-intensive and credible way to do it.

Raffensperger has enraged Republicans by saying there is no widespread voter fraud of any kind on his watch.

It will take him until the 20th to validate the vote and certify it for the Electoral College.

Remember, Biden can win without Georgia, but Trump will look pretty bad if the recount he practically forced himself validates a Biden victory, which it appears that it will.

The rest of the world is ready to move on, Trump is doing his expected spectacular infantile tantrum – he is a five-year-old with the world’s most powerful army under his command –  and still leading the news every day. But suddenly, another President is on the news alongside him. It’s no fun anymore.

As for McConnell, it is pointless to look to him for moral leadership. Everything McConnel does is political; he is an institutional mole and backroom creature.

He’s not looking to be Lenin and lead a revolution. He wants to keep his Senate majority to block Democratic progress and appoint more unqualified but conservative judges. Think small.

The idea coalescing around the Republican Senate and Donald Trump is that this the date – October 20 – is when he can save some face by proving he kept on fighting and acknowledging Biden’s victory and permitting the transition go forth.

He will not ever concede or stop whining about voting fraud.

After November 20, he can go about pardoning himself and his many crooked buddies. Unfortunately for him, he can’t pardon himself from state crimes, only federal ones.

A bunch of state attorneys general are eagerly awaiting his return to civilian life. And he has a business which is hemorrhaging money to try to fix, although his financial history isn’t promising.

Joe Biden understands all this and refuses, as he has throughout, to take Trump’s bait and play his game. Every day, he moves forward, the very picture of the industrious President who cares for his people.

Every day, Donald Trump sulks and stews and plots and schemes and does not do anything to help or address a nation in crisis.

Biden is giving him and the public a daily lesson on how to govern, rather than tweet. He can’t take much more of that. Yes, he is dangerous. No, he is not that dangerous.

He will do something racist, outrageous, or fascistic every single day until January 20. He needs attention to live. And there is never enough.

If I were you, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to panic and worry. People need to get off of the Trump Crazy Train and move forward.

Joe Biden is showing them how.