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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In less than 100 days, America will vote. In other words, there is finally a light at the end of this long and dark tunnel we've all been going through. And unless things drastically change for the worse, that light might shine very bright indeed.

Pretty much every poll under the sun now shows Democrats with the upper hand in the campaign. Joe Biden is doing better -- at both the national level and the state level -- than either of Barack Obama's winning years, as well being better positioned than Hillary Clinton was the last time around. In fact, Biden's poll numbers across the Electoral College are now higher than Obama or Clinton ever reached at any point in their respective campaigns. Public opinion of the coronavirus and President Donald Trump's pitifully inadequate reaction to it has hardened like cement. No wonder he's trying a new tactic ("OK, I'll pretend like I care about it for a week, how's that?") and reversing course on his disastrously self-centered plan for his big convention speech. And it's now looking like he won't be able to hold any rallies at all for the foreseeable future, especially when you consider that the hardest-hit areas of the country right now are either solidly Republican or the battleground states Trump's going to need. No rallies means depriving Trump's massive ego of the attention it so desperately craves.

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It's a bit early for one of my "summer daydream" columns, as I usually wait until the silly season in August when Congress decamps for the entire month (and political pundits are left with some mighty thin gruel to report on), but since Trump took office the silly season has really expanded to 365 days a year, when you think about it. So I'm going to engage in some pure blue-sky speculation today, because this one thought has been bouncing around the back of my brain for a few weeks now.

There is one man who might just be able to guarantee that Joe Biden wins the November election. Because I really think all it would take would be if Dr. Anthony Fauci were either fired or got so fed up with the political smear job the White House has actively been pursuing against him that he handed in his resignation. If Fauci then publicly announced his full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden for president, I think the race would be all but over.

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At this point, one has to wonder: is President Donald Trump intentionally trying to commit political suicide?

This would certainly make a lot of sense, given his recent actions. Perhaps he's tired of attempting to do a job he is so obviously underqualified for, and perhaps he just wants to return to private life. To do so, Joe Biden has to win, meaning Trump has to guarantee this outcome. So he goes about actively destroying any possibility that he'll win re-election.

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Welcome to the first 2020 installment of our quadrennial series tracking the electoral math in the presidential race. We've done this three times previously, and (like pretty much everyone else in the political prediction game) failed miserably the last time around. Hey, two out of three ain't bad, right?

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The campaign to re-elect Donald Trump president has gone all-in on a remarkable strategy: they're going to double down on the stupid. Call it the greatest attempt at gaslighting ever, we suppose. The idea is to just pretend the coronavirus pandemic doesn't exist and continue to ignore any evidence to the contrary. And they actually expect this to be a big winner for them with the voters.

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You can call it many things. Shooting one's self in the foot. Being hoist on your own petard. A European might call it an "own goal." But whatever metaphor you choose, it seems Donald Trump is actively sabotaging his own chances of re-election. Trump, in classic Trumpian style, has chosen to make a political statement about an issue that really has nothing to do with politics at all. And it's beginning to work among his most fervent followers. The only problem for Trump is that this means it is also working against his chances of re-election.

Even though both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have been casting their ballots by mail for the past few elections, Trump decided it would be a dandy idea to demonize voting by mail. But due to the overwhelming likelihood that this November's elections are going to be radically different in nature than previous elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, this means that the Republican Party is being hamstrung in its efforts to get its voters to safely vote by mail. Trump may not just be killing his own chances of being re-elected, but he may also bring a whole bunch of other Republicans down with him as well.

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The Trump campaign is setting itself up for a rather large tactical failure. Whether the campaign fails overall in November is a bigger question, of course, but they seem to already be failing in one crucial aspect of any successful presidential campaign, and that is to define your opponent early. This worked wonders for Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and it also did the trick for George W. Bush against John Kerry. Throughout the spring and summer, the incumbent president successfully defined their challenger in a very negative way with the public.

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The more time goes on, the more evidence stacks up that Donald Trump is simply incapable of performing the basic duties of a United States president. What is the president's job, boiled down? To process incoming problems and information, make policy decisions, and then implement those decisions. Trump fails spectacularly on all three legs of this stool on a regular basis. But this week has been really notable, due to Trump's utter failure to defend the Constitution of the United States (and the country at large, of course) against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

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