It was early in the morning. There was a lot of news. The elite and well equipped federal soldiers sent in to dominate Portland for the President were packing up and fleeing, driven off by moms and protesters.

Several states set records for the most deaths reported in a single day after the U.S. has just surpassed 150,000 deaths, the highest toll of any nation in the world.  America’s economic output fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter, the biggest drop in recorded history. Millions of Americans faced evictions and the loss of any kind of benefits. Congress was paralyzed, and tens of thousands of small and large businesses were closed or closing.

President Trump wrote two tweets, one of which made a lot of news – his floating moving the Election because of the virus – and one which didn’t get much attention but which was, in many ways, the most telling:

“Support Patio Pizza, and its wonderful owner, Guy Caligiuri, in St. James, Long Island (N.Y.)” the President of the United States tweeted, referring to a restaurant owner who said he faced severe backlash for supporting Donald Trump.

There was no mention of the deaths, the virus, the economy, the job, and business losses. Well, it wasn’t as if he had a  lot to do.

Suddenly we are in a different place. The confident, bullying, strongman sent to shake up Washington seemed confused, lonely, depressed, and unmoored.

This week is essential for our understanding of the November election.

This week, the Trump presidency collapsed, as did the illusion of a strong and indestructible leader with magical powers to hold his supporters in place.

There’s not enough time to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

A political leader who depended on his mystique as all-knowing and powerful appeared to have lost all the air in his balloon and some marbles in his head.

I can only guess at what Trump thought – he is an addictive media watcher – as everything he hated and resented and everyone he had assaulted and alienated gather in Atlanta to celebrate a beloved political figure he refused to honor or acknowledge – John Lews. There they all were, Obama, Clinton, Bush, Pelosi – he hated every one of them, including Lewis.

And there they all were while he was tweeting pizza, soaking up all that dignity. As part of the ceremony, Obama handed him another new major campaign issue for him to deal with – the suppression of black voters by Republican governors and legislatures. A new civil rights call to arms.

All the people who had dismissed him laughed at him, treated him so unfairly, sitting in the media glow that was his, every day for four years.

But all that ceremony aside, I think the moms were the last straw, the final humiliation in a long string of defeats. Napoleon had one Waterloo; Trump has had five or six in one week.

Trump has become a heckler in his own government, his own life.

This week, he complained that people didn’t like him, even though he was beautiful and heroic in his duty.  Why did they like Dr. Fauci more than him, he wondered to the whole country? “It must be because of my personality,” he opined.

Duh.

He undermines the doctors, gives conflicting advice every day on the masks, touts discredited cures from quacks, and insults and offends black people and black protesters on the very day civil rights icon John Lewis is being buried.

He trashed his election, something he would never have considered if he thought there was the slightest possibility of winning it.

In between another round of those dreadful and awkward appearances in the White House press room meant to look Presidential, he promoted various medical conspiracies and goofy theories on social media.

Give it up, people, you can only fool all of the people some of the time.

President Trump has been too busy tweeting about pizza to take any kind of constructive role in managing the coronavirus. He can’t get any kind of economic recovery plan through congress, the usually slobbering Republicans in the Senate are ignoring him, and he never stopped whining about how unfairly the world was treating him.

Every tragedy and misfortune in our bleeding country – the deaths, the lost jobs, the protests, the statues, the failed bullying of the schools to all open right now! – It was his; it was all about him and his personality. All of this was being done to him.

So this is what it means to be narcissistic.

American is living through a Wonderland.

Fox News and the MAGA squadrons, Trump’s two primary sources of strength, see in him a bad boy, a cuddly bear with great intentions, a well-meaning and helpless victim, as he has been for so long, of liberals, elitists, Democrats, progressives and various dread Marxists, Socialists, rapist immigrants and don’t forget communists.

They have so much invested in him, it must be so hard to let it go.

Trump and his followers got stuck in the Fall of 2016. They are still calling for poor Hilary Clinton to be locked up, but she should have some roommates – Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, James Comey, those F.B.I. Lovers, and a host of Deep State conspirators.

The jail is full, the jail is empty.

On the other side of this deranged world, the liberals, progressives, and Democrats traumatized by four years of Trumpism are beginning to grasp that he might be mortal and going down in flames like one of those fighters we see in movies about the Battle of London.

They don’t know what to do now, they are so used to being frightened.

It feels like that, doesn’t it?

All the suffering people were simply backgrounded noise, irrelevant pieces on his own tangled chessboard, they were all representations of his bad fortune, and growing humiliation.

They didn’t matter, as one grieving granddaughter said about the death of her mother. They just didn’t matter.

Even the much-maligned Dr. Fauci had mistreated the President by being chosen to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals opening game. Trump concluded that Fauci was trying to show him out.

He dropped pretending to care about the virus and pointedly told reporters during a virus press conference that he had been invited to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, which turned out to be news to the Yankees.

The next day, he announced he had changed his mind, he was too busy tending to the virus he didn’t believe was really happening. Except for the one press conference where it might be happening, and it might be a good idea to wear a mask.

That lasted one day, by morning he was re-tweeting more conspiracy theories about aliens, Dr. Fauci and his favorite useless medications that “people” told him about. The only people who actually knew anything about the virus were banned from the briefings so he could spread lies and false theories unimpaired or corrected.

Being crazy is his default position. He likes it.

The big news had fizzled by mid-afternoon.

finally tweeted the very thing that has terrified Democrats and progressives and liberals for years now, the idea that he would cancel or move or ignore the Election.

“It will,” he tweeted, “be a great embarrassment to the U.S.A. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote???”

He needed three question marks to underline his timidity and confusion. By now, even he must know that he has been the greatest embarrassment to the U.S.A. of all.

He didn’t even bother to pretend that he had the power to do it. The bear had become a pussycat.

Politics is as cold and savage a business as real estate, and you can almost feel the loneliness as one ally after another -the top figures in his party – jumped ship and blasted his pathetic election idea right out of the sky.

Politicians hate losers, they smell like death to them.

If anything demonstrated his powerlessness and decline, it was the yawn that greeted this once dreaded announcement. It was just Trump tweeting crazy shit.

Trump has given up even attending meetings on the coronavirus, or economic-relief talks. Every single thing Mary Trump said was true.

He has no interest in governing, only soaking up praise and using and misusing power. He can’t manage anything in a country desperate for leadership.

And he knows it now; he has the instincts of a wolverine, if not the life skills. His worst nightmare -humiliation, powerless, defeat – is upon him.

While the “three presidents” honored John Lewis in Atlanta,  Trump had fallen into yet another hole, and self-created disaster – Portland: the Wall of Moms had humiliated him.

His campaign to unleash federal troops on those lawless Democratic cities had collapsed.  There wasn’t much left to try. Racism wasn’t scoring either.

Portland was his latest great idea for victory – invade a bunch of Democratic cities and provoke enough unrest to propel him to victory.

He didn’t reckon on the moms.

After a middle school puff-up Wednesday night, Trump’s private army was packing up and getting the hell out of Portland, letting the  Oregon police do what the feds couldn’t do in a month – calm things down.

In my first political column a month or two ago, I wrote that Donald Trump would not be re-elected President on November 3. It was strange because I just had a feeling about it.

I had and have no inside information or access to people in power, nor did I want to talk to them.

Far from the centers of power, sitting and writing on my beautiful farm, I couldn’t shake the image of a broken and deeply troubled man, masquerading as a strongman and an invincible leader.

I’m sorry to have been hard on him, not that he cares, but I was shocked when I read Mary Trump’s book and saw the man I had seen in my head day after day. I get him now.

Perhaps my own experience as a broken man led me to recognize one when I saw him. We do know each other.

This experience has been revelatory for me.  Perhaps it is still possible to think for yourself, free of labels and pundits and inside sources.

I want to trust my instincts, not other people’s and take responsibility for what I write. The truth is, I had no idea how correct I was or might be.

I watched some of the John Lewis funeral on T.V. I noted Nancy Pelosi’s very pointed comment that “there are three presidents here today.” She knows how to stick it in without letting anyone see the blade.

With the bad economic news went any hope of getting his booming economy back in time for the Election. His much-touted “V” economic recovery evaporated, and I sincerely felt some empathy

for him.

For once, something that happened to him did seem unfair. Then I came to my senses. He wasn’t sick; he wasn’t dying; he hadn’t lost his job (not yet). What happened to him wasn’t quite as bad and unfair as 150,000 people dying, many due to his stupidity and arrogance.

Mary Trump was spot on when she wrote the President is not capable of managing or learning or telling the truth, his mind just can’t work that way. By now, he had run off every one of the experienced people he initially chose to help him run his government.

There is no one to help him climb out of it, but him, and he is a hole-digger, not a rescuer.

Given the extreme and frightening nature of his musings about canceling the Election – has no legal authority to do so – Trump seemed like anything but an invincible strongman.

Mostly, according to the Washington Post, the Democrats dismissed the election threat as Trump being Trump, now unhinged by his bad fortunes.

The timing and context of Trump’s tweet highlighted the very thing he dreads.

He has become a caricature of himself,  something of a troubling joke, a loudmouth narcissist promoting crackpot theories and ideas while his country’s economy crumbles, and people lost their jobs and die.

It is, ironically, the perfect environment for someone who claims to be an infallible, stable genius who is never wrong and does a beautiful job on everything he undertakes.

Today marked the official beginning of the beginning of the end for Donald Trump and the hypnotic and mesmerizing grip on the American psyche.

For the people he tormented, it’s time to look ahead. The country is in a terrible mess, and the Democrats will be expected to fix it.  One battle ends, another begins.

Meanwhile, don’t forget the important news. Guy Caliguiri was selling a lot of pizza in St. James, Long Island.