They say that the political pendulum swings slowly but unerringly from very conservative to somewhat liberal. Also, a political era lasts about 40 years. If those observations are true , then the year 2020 should mark the year when conservatism retreats in the United States until about 2060.

The conservative era has had a spotted record. Achievements are hard to find. But they have worked tirelessly in passing laws to their advantage including gerrymandering state voting districts, making the act of voting more and more difficult, killing freedom to choose via legislation, removing regulations on big business, eliminating competition in the marketplace, forging behemoth oligopolies, packing courts with the conservative mindset, while watching our infrastructure crumble, and our ability to defend ourselves from nature weaken, until they reached the biggest prize of all: They eliminated the inheritance tax, thus assuring families of wealthy dynasties that could last forever—or at least well past the next pendulum swing.

The current cycle began about 1980 with the Reagan administration. An entire generation of dysfunctional minds welcomed a class B movie actor and the Laffer curve as their best hope for seducing a nation into believing that all the financial issues in the country could be solved by lowering taxes on the wealthy all the way down to zero. Only then, they asserted, could America find her footing while conservative philanthropy and free markets would bring us all to the Promised Land. Moreover, government was not the answer to our problems, Reagan told us, the “government is the problem.” Suffice to say, if Donald Trump had not come of age during this era, we might well have had to invent him.

Donald Trump is a caricature of himself—a total buffoon who has no talent for anything except going broke with other people’s money, not paying taxes, hating women, and lying.  He appeals to 46 percent of our population, or according to Abraham Maslow, those in desperate need of companionship and an authoritarian to lead them.  At last count he has told more than 17,000 lies. He also likes to grade himself. According to him, he is a genius who is never wrong about anything. When facts show otherwise, he simply corrects those facts by re-writing his own history and by changing his utterances to one of a range of possibilities. And he never takes responsibility for any of his inept decisions. He just explains them away ex post facto: He trusts mindless loyalists who are at his own level of incompetency. So he does the decent thing and fires them. What can they say? He has their Nondisclosure Agreements in his pocket.

Donald likes to brag about the economy that he built, knowing that he only inherited it. We built it. But he was so inept he could not de-rail it, try as he might. Despite it all, he was well on his way to a second term of destroying America until—Karma intervened.

And when the coronavirus hit, everything changed.

Now his ineptitude is on display every day in every way. He cannot manage anything or anyone. The emperor has no clothes. His lies are disputed by experts. He blames anyone except himself. But his self-grading system cannot erase the rising death tolls. He degraded and fired a distinguished Admiral for asking for medical help for his crew of 5,000 men and women. Then he fired the deputy who flew to Guam to insult the Admiral after the public shouted their disapproval. Meanwhile, the death toll keeps rising.

Who can say what measures he will call upon to derail, sidetrack, fiddle with, or otherwise try to change the course of history as it continues to roll in between now and November? Will he plead with Russia, Iraq, and North Korea to twist and meddle with our votes? Karma has its own way of teaching and rewarding. But I’m guessing that Donald and the last 40 years of conservatism have nothing left in their tool kit. Personally, I am going to stay hunkered down, and a safe distance from all the lies and deceit, and wailing. When the moving finger writes the only history that matters, I want to be just an observer.  There is something cool about watching bodies fly.