I say this as someone with no pity for Donald Trump: there is a pathos to his story. Here is a man propped up from day one by a cruel father; a man who couldn't succeed on his own, yet through sheer demographic luck was awarded enormous wealth and power, only to squander both...

Trump was the perfect tool for much shrewder and even wickeder men, who dangled him in front of millions of people already primed by right wing media to be angry and paranoid in the face of demographic change they couldn't understand or control. The goal: get money. Get power.

And the shrewd men got it. And now they really don't need to tolerate Trump anymore. They have what they want. And the millions they sucked into the maelstrom are already submerged in it, ready to be pumped up with more rage and more fear, with Trump himself reduced to a meme.

The machine won big over the last four years. America got gutted, with nearly a quarter million of us dead and the rest terrified or enraged or depressed or stressed or all of the above. The chaos only works for one group: the very, very rich. Trump was the mark AND the ruse...

Racism and fear is the fuel. And it's a resource that unlike fossil fuels never runs out. What a sad, sad state for this country. I don't have good predictions for where it goes from here. There are people who are still milking white rage and fear for profit and they won't stop.

They will let this country burn to craft a new villain out of relentlessly inoffensive Joe Biden. And of course, to villainize Kamala Harris for daring to be Black and a woman at the same time. And so the wheel keeps turning. May God help these two countries, lashed together.