"Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences." – Robert Louis Stevenson

If you missed Trump’s amazing performance in the Rose Garden today (Tuesday 7-14-2020) it really is a stark profile in pathology. It occurred on the same day his niece, a clinical psychologist, published her book detailing how the President came by his unique combination of narcissism, arrogance, ignorance, and profound insecurity. All those qualities were in the open today for the world to see.

For 54 minutes, in a display of whining self pity and grotesque self aggrandizement that would embarrass any remotely normal person, he preened and blamed and talked about the millions of lives he’d saved by shutting down flights, even as Americans are now shut out of many nations due to our inability to control the spread of the Covid virus. He angrily asserting that testing “adds more cases” and then moments later claimed proudly we’re “number one in testing”. He spent most of his time attacking Obama and Biden, who have been out of power for over three years. And what little he had to say about the Covid-19 pandemic bore little relation to reality, this on the day that his administration ramps up its attacks on its own most credible public health official (Faucci) and orders hospitals to not report new cases to the CDC.

Step back and examine that, and we can predict where this is going.

Covid-19 is now spreading exponentially in pockets large and small throughout the nation. Failing a national testing and tracing strategy that could actually contain it, it’s predictable that it will not be contained. Given how it effects the population, it will be clearer and clearer to more and more people that the “herd immunity” strategy (which is Trump’s default strategy) is high risk, and comes at a very high cost. This cost will only get higher over the next three months as we run toward the election.

Large indoor rallies will be very risky. Will they do them? With so many GOP delegates in their 50s and 60s, will the GOP do a convention next month? With the cornerstone of Trump’s campaign strategy a series of super spreader rallies, will Trump double down and do them anyway?

My guess, from what we saw today, is yes, yes, and yes.

And as Trump and his allies double down on the “open America at all costs” strategy, they will do more and more damage, and lose more and more support. And barring a miracle, a stroke, or a shooting war, Trump will lose. Not by a little, by a historic margin. The Democrats will gain a comfortable majority in the House. And the GOP will get the humiliation they have earned.

All you have to do is vote.