I can’t blame the framers of the Constitution for the trouble we are in.

There was no context in which they could have imagined a damaged reality TV star and unrepenting liar and bigot who had failed all of his life taking over the leadership of their new hard-fought country and its lofty ideals.

The writers of the Constitution imagined a pandemic, but not a President who believed it existed. Nor did they envision a populace that would ever elect such a person as Donald Trump, close election or not.

Very few people in American in 2016 imagined it either. Perhaps it never really happened; it was all a brilliant project by Russian hackers meant to get our heads spinning.

Without the Electoral College, Trump would not be President today, and I would not be writing about politics again.

Benjamin Franklin said the founders had given the people a Republic “if they could keep it.” Shame on us, we have no one but ourselves to blame for coming this close to blowing it.

To understand the tension and frustration, fear – and rage – surrounding this presidential election, it’s essential to know and understand the elephant in the room of every presidential election in America.

It’s a dry subject, but central, a genuine issue at the heart of this election—something unique to America, a puzzle elsewhere.

That is the Electoral College, a profoundly dull and confusing entity that is as much or more responsible for Donald Trump and the country’s grinding divisions and polarizations than any other thing.

The very existence of the EC is full of irony. I found this explanation of the Electoral College from November 8, 2016, New York Times to be clear and useful.

In the world’s first genuine democracy, the people don’t get to choose the President directly. The electors get to do that.

One of the major reasons Congress created an Electoral College – there were several – was because Jefferson and John Adams and his fellow constitutionalists didn’t trust the average citizens to choose wisely when selecting a President.

They were worried about landless and poor people choosing a demagogue or a King. I hope Jefferson isn’t hovering about us today, poor man. Adams would probably shoot himself.

Jefferson and his peers were well educated “gentlemen,” they always feared that one day, uneducated mobs without land would elect a president just like Donald Trump.

The Electoral College was one more obstacle to that. It restrains and complicates the system. In America, your vote doesn’t exactly decide who becomes president. The Electoral College does.

Initially, the Electoral College provided the divided Constitutional Convention with a compromise between those who wanted a popular election and those who wanted Congress to elect a President.

Critics argue that the College is undemocratic; it permits the election of a candidate who has not won the most votes, and its winner-take-all approach cancels out the votes of the losing candidates in each state, unlike other forms of democratic government.

A popular election would encourage states to increase their influence by expanding, not contracting, their electorate. The Electoral College offers no such incentive.

What Jefferson and his colleagues never imagined was that the union would elect a President with so much contempt for their Constitution and its checks and balances. In Trump’s America, there is no respect for differences of opinion and no assumption of common purpose and shared norms and morals.

The best I can say about Trump’s relation to the Constitution is that he has probably never read it. The worst one can say is that he has read it and wants to destroy it.

Day by day, America, just a few years ago, the most powerful and admired country in the world, is becoming a laughing stock, a global symbol of dysfunction, nationalism, isolation, growing economic grief,  and incompetence.

And many thousands of people are paying for it with their lives. I wish I could paint a better picture of it, but I don’t believe in lying. I am hopeful.

President Trump is fighting for his minority to continue to tyrannize the majority.  It is frightening to be so excluded and dismissed and loathed by a powerful leader. Speaking only for myself, there is no place for me in this man’s America.

Something has to give as Americans get wearier and wearier of stagnation and argument. There is evidence that we are beginning to see the beginning of that process.

Nobody knows where or what the end is or what it looks like.

Many Americans are terrified of Trump’s efforts to undermine mail voting during a pandemic and cripple the post office, which has to deliver the mail ballots. At the same time, he is simultaneously spreading distrust of the election by falsely claiming fraud and conspiracy.

He is not working to win; he is preparing to lose, re-imaging the electoral process as a rigged farce, praying the courts will somehow bail him out.

That is what the football coaches call a “Hail Mary,” a desperate long-shot pass at the end of a losing game.

It is not the strategy either of a winner or a leader, which is its fatal flaw.

Opponents of Trump and Trumpism are donating money and registering to vote in the record and unprecedented numbers. Joe Biden is raising millions of dollars every week.

The specter of another Electoral College election is Trump’s worst enemy, although he doesn’t seem to know it.

Black Lives Matter in 2020, and after four years of Trump all votes matter.

One of the shining jewels of American democracy is the idea of peaceful transfer of power. Trump will make sure it’s a nightmare. But it will happen. The civic structure of America is sound and robust. He is neither smart enough nor strong enough to destroy it.

But there are lots of enablers. It’s a sorry thing to see politicians who talk so warmly of patriotism and tradition fall silent as both are stained and stomped on.

One reason the Electoral College Exists in America is to protect the smaller and less populated and rural states – Trump Country – from the larger and more populated states – a/k/a New York, California, Pennsylvania, etc.

It’s the familiar story – country versus city, rural versus urban, diverse versus white. The two Americas at war on and off for centuries.

Most European countries are more homogenous than America; they have plenty of divisions but are not so geographically and politically disparate and entrenched.

America is a new country, a baby, and its moment in the sun is fading. That is not Donald Trump’s work.

This, according to every thoughtful observer, is the Asian century, we can huff and puff about China all we want, but it’s their time, not ours. And that might just be a good thing for the United States,  a country with so many problems to solve.

Do we really need to have soldiers in 150 countries?

I’d love to live in a country that is not at war somewhere in the world.

Maybe we will take care of our own people for a change, and make them safer and healthier and more secure. Maybe we have no choice now. The greatest irony of all is that this just may well be Trump’s most significant legacy.

It’s not my favorite subject, but I believe it’s important for people to understand the Electoral College and the role it is playing in this election.

Two of the nation’s last three presidents won the presidency in the Electoral College, even though they lost the popular vote nationwide. In 2000, Al Gore outpolled George W. Bush by more than 540,000 votes but lost in the Electoral College, 271–266. Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton tallied almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but lost decisively in the Electoral College, 306–232.

When people are shut out of the governing process, they get angry and disenchanted. This happened during the Obama years, and it’s happening during the Trump years.

Constitutional Scholar G. Alan Tarr wrote a valuable article about our misconceptions and misunderstandings about the Electoral College in the Atlantic Magazine last November. You can read it here.

Simply, the Electoral College is a body of electors created by the U. S. Constitution, which gathers every four years to elect the President and vice president formally. Electors are chosen by the states; the College consists of 538 electors, an absolute majority of at least 270 electoral votes is required to win the election.

State electors are bound to follow the choice of state voters; the proportion of electoral college votes is meant to put something between the mob and the presidency and also to support the idea of federalism. All states have power, but the design of a federal system is protected.

The Electoral College was meant to balance the influence some states might have over others, and one region over another. In the Electoral College system, each state gets a certain number of electors based on its total number of representatives in Congress. Each elector casts one electoral vote following the general election; there are a total of 538 electoral votes. The candidate that gets more than half (270) wins the election.

Some say the EC was created to protect slavery.

I’m not a Constitutional Scholar, but it is true that if the majority ruled, the country might well be able to move forward with legislation that addresses social and economic problems from abortion to gun control that is now impossible to resolve or legislate.

Most Americans favor some form of gun control, some abortion rights,  affordable health care, and stricter regulation of banks and lending institutions. Most Americans believe in climate change, and want their government to join in the global response to it.

Trump, a minority President in a way, is opposed to all of those things. His party supports him. And the Electoral College makes it possible to ignore what the majority of Americans want.

That is a poison pill for democracy. What is healthy about half of the country being powerless and without representation.

In the Electoral College System – especially when parties are so partisan- the losers have no say in the daily process of governing. A responsible President will reach out to the opposition, Trump won’t.

When Obama was President, conservatives and Republics felt excluded by a President who seemed to be contemptuous of them and indifferent to negotiating.

Obama infuriated his opponents by using executive orders to thwart Congress. Trump, the President who would be King, loves executive orders and has used them to diminish or even completely ignore and bypass the wishes of Congress.

The constitution empowers Congress with “the power of the purse.” They are supposed to decide where the money goes.

In a parliamentary system, the losers get to participate in the government. In America, they can only participate at the whim and generosity of the President.

And Trump is anything but generous or interested in listening to others.

When Democrats are in power, conservatives feel tyrannized.

When Republicans are in power, Democrats feel excluded and oppressed. Since bi-partisanship is no longer and a means for compromise, little gets done by either side for four years at a stretch.

For each political party, it’s a take-no-prisoners system, victory at all costs by any means.

As a result, there is a lot more at stake in a presidential election than a single candidate. Since landslides are less and less likely in such a polarized country, leaders become more and more important.

Love him or hate him; Trump demonstrates how a President can set the tone in a country. Is there cause for hope? Sure.

A different leader could set a different tone,  and perhaps chip away at the rigidity of the left and right and support independents and moderates in the middle.

A different kind of leader may even alter the perspectives of the cultists and ideological combatants at each end of the political spectrum, some of whom correspond with me daily.

Trump and the Democrats have long understood that the 2020 election will also be close in a divided nation, and the Electoral College could once again be a factor in the outcome.

As far back as May of 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that the Democratic Party needed to “win big up and down the ballot” to prevent Trump from claiming the election was rigged.

In one sense, her dreams have come true.  Trump has so badly bungled the country’s handling of the coronavirus, racial issues, and the recovery, and is so obnoxious, self-centered, and incoherent that Democrats could well get themselves the victory she hoped for.

Even most bankers say they are planning to vote for Biden.

For our purposes here, it’s essential to know that there are at least a half dozen reasons why the Founders wanted an electoral college.

One was to protect the slave states and slavery from the abolitionists in New York and Massachusetts. Another way to protect the country from an electorate that might go rogue and elect someone like Donald Trump. This is what partisanship does.

If there were any reason for a common cause that is not politicized, it would be a global pandemic. But for the President, it’s just another way to divide and conquer. There is no other path for him in his mind.

Ironically, the idea of a pandemic was one of the reasons the Constitutional Convention wanted a federal system. There were times they predicted when things like wars and disease would threaten the Republic, and only a federal government could respond well on behalf of the whole country.

Trump simply pretends this is not true, that it’s the state’s responsibility – without guidance or funding –  to respond to a crisis like the pandemic at the individual whims of the governors, who he alternately praises and attacks depending on their political affiliation.

He has a penchant for self-destruction.

In dumping the pandemic onto the governor’s, and denying any responsibility,  he leaves no national system or strategy for stopping the virus. The states are going broke, and each governor has a different idea for responding.

Politicians on the right believe the College exists to protect  rural and smaller states from the “tyranny of the majority.” In the larger and more populated states, there a growing feeling that the College has created a “tyranny” of the minority, in which a candidate like Trumpp – who was rejected by three million Americans more than Hilary Clinton – can still win.

Who is tyrannizing who is the subject of endless debate (not here), but it is important to understand that Trump is very much a President who rules by minority, not majority series of policies and appointments.

America has always been a centrist and moderate, slightly to the right nation, conservative in religious and moral ways, generous in its view of immigrants, and sometimes, the poor (the Depression.) Our two-party system was built on the principles of negotiation, compromise, and bi-partisanship when it mattered.

The two parties always came together in times of war and crisis and national emergency, the pandemic (apart from the first civil war) is quite literally the first time bi-partisanship, compromise, and negotiation have been rejected by both sides in such a dire crisis.

Very few Americans wanted to go to war in 1941, but when the country did, America helped to save the modern world. That could not happen in 2020.

The left is drifting to the left, and the right is drifting to the right, the middle is shrinking, but even more powerful, since they are the tie-breakers. Such tie-breakers are persuadable and still capable of making independent decisions.

Suburban and African-American women are about to save our Republic. Jefferson couldn’t have imagined that either.

What you can see in this presidential election is a universal sense of grievance – each side complaining about the tyranny of the other – and the first President who sees contempt for government and governing, grievance and division, and racial resentment as the core ideologies of his administration.

Trump has also coyly and not so subtly flirted with and winked at and whispered in the ears of the white nationalist movement, long marginalized as a hate group, but suddenly closely allied with an admiring President.

In a country as diverse as this, that is a hopeless movement, but truly fuel for the fire.

What frightens Democrats the most is the idea that Trump could once again lose the election and still win the Electoral College.

What frightens Trump the most is that everyone in the country can efficiently and fairly gets to vote.

He reads the same poll numbers you do, and he knows that he has very little time to undermine faith in the electoral process and distract beleaguered and exhausted voters from the awful reality of the pandemic, which he has failed to address adequately.

At the moment, Trump has some unexpected allies – the protesters and demonstrators vandalizing businesses and burning down police precincts. This is the Armageddon he promises will come if Democrats come to power.

The specter of anarchy and violence is his best friend.

So far, none of his ploys and destructions have worked. People trust Biden, more than him; they believe Biden is more competent than he is and also nicer. I think every time Trump mumbles and rants about “Sleepy Joe Biden,” Biden will take a bike ride and laugh.

Everybody knows that Trump could never get on a bike.

Time is running out for Trump, and nothing is working. He seems to be as incompetent and flawed as his niece Mary Trump says he is, she is turning out to be the true pundit of the 2020 election, the person most worth listening to.

For the country to heal, it will take more than an election. It will take a leader who can break through the wall of misunderstanding and anger and grievance building on both sides.

One side has to prevail and control the government. A leader has to emerge who can transcend the tribalism that is poisoning the country. I happen to believe that will happen.

I believe that process is already underway as much of the country has embraced a revolution, a gentler, kinder, and more empathetic idea of government.

I believe this wave will come ashore in November, and the country can begin the long and challenging process of coming together again.