It seems that it is now time to ask a very strange question: Is Donald Trump actually trying to lose the election?

As astounding a question that is, there are really only two answers to it: yes or no. Either Trump is intentionally torpedoing his chances of re-election, or he is just trying to re-run his 2016 playbook in the hopes that it'll produce the same miraculous victory for him. But either way, what is becoming more and move evident is that President Donald Trump is currently losing. Bigly.

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Late last night, the political world began reeling from what could be the biggest October surprise in a generation (at the very least), as the White House announced that President Donald Trump and his wife First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19.

This was greeted in some quarters as not so much an October surprise as (to coin a term) an October schadenfreudefest. If there is any one individual who richly deserves to contract the coronavirus, after all, it is Donald Trump. Trump has pooh-poohed the virus from the very first, insisting that it will magically go away ("by April, when the weather warms up"), that it isn't that big a deal ("it's like the flu"), that testing is unnecessary, that it affects "almost no one," that most people get a mild case and recover, that many don't even know they've got it, that children "get the sniffles" (no big deal), that we've already defeated it ("we've turned the corner"), that it's all in the past, that getting the economy going again and getting kids back to school is more important than any imagined risk, and -- worst of all -- that wearing masks and social distancing and all that stuff is for sissies and definitely not for real macho men like him. Or to put it another way, the karma wasn't instant, but it caught up to Trump in the end.

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American democracy is on fire. Or on its deathbed, at the very least. Choose any dire metaphor you wish, but the red flags and warning signals are everywhere you look. The president of the United States of America made news this week when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, should he lose the upcoming election. Later, watching the reaction on the news, President Donald Trump reportedly laughed about all the fuss he had caused:

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Olivia Troye used to be a high-level staffer for Vice President Mike Pence, and she worked closely with him on the coronavirus task force which he led. She recently quit in disgust and went public this week with her support for Joe Biden (in yet another "Republican Voters Against Trump" video). The most damning thing she had to say about the president was the following:

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Another week, another stunning revelation about the dishonesty and shallowness of our president, it seems. Last week, you'll remember, it was the low regard Trump held ("suckers" and "losers") for American soldiers who died in wartime, American soldiers who were wounded ("nobody wants to see that"), and American soldiers and veterans in general. This week, Bob Woodward leaked a few key excerpts (backed up by audio recordings) from his upcoming book Rage, which showed that Trump understood how serious the coronavirus was going to be and then lied to the American public about it. There simply is no bottom, with Trump -- every time you think that he's reached the lowest of the low, he will once again prove that he can go even lower.

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It has been three weeks since we've done this, since for the past two Fridays we were still writing up our notes on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Now that all that hoopla is over, we can return once again to our usual Friday Talking Points format.

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The check is not in the mail; the mail is being placed in check. That's an amusing way to put a very serious and rather existential threat to American democracy which is now playing out before our very eyes. President Donald Trump is so scared that he's going to lose the upcoming election that he is exploring any possible way he can cheat, right out in front of the public where everyone can see it. Rarely has Republican voter suppression been this blatant and this shameless, in fact, and that's saying quite a lot.

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President Donald Trump, when challenged by Axios reporter Jonathan Swan this week on the fact that over a thousand Americans are dying each and every day from the coronavirus pandemic, callously responded: "It is what it is." Not exactly presidential-caliber leadership, to say the very least. After all, who can forget Abraham Lincoln's stirring: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, because, you know, the Civil War -- it is what it is." Or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's soaring: "Fear? What fear? I mean, the Great Depression... it is what it is."

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Let's all keep our eyes on the ball, shall we? The ball, in this case, being the fact that we just suffered the worst economic quarter ever. The gross domestic product dropped by 32.9 percent, or just shy (0.4 points) of one-third. This loss is three times bigger than the worst quarter ever previously measured. New unemployment claims were up again for the second week in a row, perhaps foreshadowing a "double-dip" recession, or even an actual depression.

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President Donald Trump does not like being told what to do. To be fair, very few people ever do. But Trump usually goes his own way and blows off those telling him he must do this or mustn't do that, and things have generally worked out for him in the end anyway. This week, however, was markedly different.

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