THE SCORPION AND THE GOP:

This 2020 campaign does not lack for big issues that impact every American: the worst public health crisis in 100 years, the highest unemployment since the Great Depression. This is a moment that uniquely calls out for strong presidential leadership. Most presidents would grasp that their fate lay with the public's view of their response and act accordingly.  

Not Donald Trump. It's clear his instinct is to make the 2020 election a cultural war, which in his interpretation is just a socially acceptable term for a race war. Why? How does this make any political sense? 

The answer is that it doesn't but it is what Trump wants to do. Steve Bannon liked to say of Trump, "Dude, he's Archie Bunker," but that seems overly generous. Archie had Meathead, who strongly disagreed with him and would argue. Trump has his children and a son-in-law who serve the same purpose in a Trump administration as the devoted Waylon Smithers does for his boss in "The Simpsons."

There is a need in Trump world to describe his erratic behavior and lack of discipline as some kind of brilliant hidden strategy because otherwise, you are left with the conclusion that he is a blithering idiot. Which, of course, Trump is, but he's an idiot with deep racial animosity that dates back decades. Now with his reelection campaign crumbling around him, Trump is lashing out trying to divide the country along racial lines.  

This isn't surprising. We shouldn't forget that Trump still says that the falsely convicted Central Park Five, African Americans he had said deserved the death penalty, are guilty despite exoneration. But what is shocking, if not surprising, is that the Republican Party is going along with Trump's strategy to model his campaign after Wallace's 1968 run for president. It reveals a combination of moral failure and political stupidity rarely evidenced by a major party. 

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