A HOUSE DIVIDED

I’m going to edit myself.

So put the eraser away. I’m sick of talking heads and paid political analysts except maybe Louisiana’s James “Ole Serpent Head” Carville, who is never, ever boring — especially when he wears his melon-colored U.S. Marine Corps tarp while being interviewed.

I’m done being gobsmacked at President Donald Trump’s narcissistic rants.

I’ve had it with political polls, pundits and speechifying.

I’m tired of charting the subtle palette changes of Trump’s orange face paint, glued hair and the detritus of presidential candidate Joe

Biden’s aging hair plugs. Danger warning, America. Our nation has entered new, uncharted territory.

We may be mired in pandemic misery, but we are now housing a desperate man upping his fume and spume game while nameshaming his “loser” foes.

Our germophobic president — the recent recipient of COVID-19 now “cured” by a “miracle” medical cocktail — is now ordering his immovable base to “stand by” while entreating his attorney general to indict his enemies before the election.

It smells of the fog of war; a furious Fuhrer shaming his generals for not obeying his road map in the last stages of World War II, which led to Hitler’s ultimate defeat. (Remember: The Russians got to Berlin first and swiped the German nuclear scientists/uranium before the Americans could.)

Lacking empathy, Trump now claims Gold Star military families may have infected him while proffering adoration and body contact.

Lacking maturity, Trump now calls Dem veep candidate

Kamala Harris a monster and a communist. Lacking professionalism, Trump also proclaims Biden a “clown” who won’t last two months?

So here is the ringer on the Trump alarm.

Trump’s invective is not new, but he is still at the nation’s helm.

The big question?

Is there another deep foxhole/ national catastrophe awaiting us ahead of the election in the next 25 days?

When the coronavirus blew up recently in my home state of North Dakota, a Republican bastion of Trump dom with 762,000 residents, it followed in the wake of their adored COVID-infected president continuing to tell the country to buckle up and NOT be afraid of the coronavirus.

It was also reported North Dakota, one of 20 states with no statewide mask mandate, now had more new cases per capita than any other state and September had been its deadliest COVID month.

Up until then, North Dakotans were rarely — if ever — wearing masks. In the Dakotas, it is your right to do what you want to do about the pandemic. Glide. Or hide.

“Hospitalizations for the virus have risen abruptly, forcing health care officials in some towns to send people to faraway hospitals, even across state lines to Montana and South Dakota,” according to a recent report in the New York Times.

Translation: My beloved birthplace — which houses the mighty Missouri River; pothole bird wetlands; free-roaming antelope; the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa tribes; and home of the historic Knife, Cannonball and Heart rivers — is populated with plenty of free-roaming prairie conservatives who obviously don’t like taking orders.

Well ... TRUMPet orders only, please.

Clicking on! The only TV at the Bismarck Airport in the state’s capital was still permanently glued to one station, Fox News, during a visit last year.

As a child of Roosevelt Democrats preparing to vote for Dem presidential contender Adlai Stevenson in 1953, I clearly remember feeling dwarfed by the groundswell of applause for the Republican candidacy of Dwight David Eisenhower during a movie theater newsreel in Riverdale, North Dakota. I was 9 years old, and it was my first lesson on what it was like not to be on the winning side.

The place erupted. If you were a Democrat in Dakota, you felt different.

Now we ask: How has our country become so divided? When did we stop listening to each other? Can we get to know each other again?

Perhaps the better question is: Did we ever really know each other in the first place?

Sneedlings . . .

Saturday’s birthdays: Mario Lopez, 47; Andrew McCutchen, 34; and Mya, 41 . ... Sunday’s birthdays: Cardi B, 28; Matt Bomer, 43; Hayley Erbert, 26.

ALEX BRANDON/AP President Donald Trump holds his mask after removing it upon returning to the White House on Monday from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was treated for COVID-19.