Fear and loathing in D.C.

Democrats despair of the weakness or ineptitude of their presidential nominee options while Donald Trump seems deathly afraid of them.

The preposterous second-place and Russian-endorsed president seems averse to taking on fair-and-square his thoroughly unimposing likely Democratic opponent—whichever thoroughly unimposing Democrat that opponent turns out to be—in the general election of 2020.

All indications are that Trump eventually will be singularly paired against either a pleasantly nondescript aging consummate politician, Joe Biden, or a populist increment of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or a rookie U.S. senator from California, Kamala Harris, who is a former prosecutor who knows how to cross-examine, but not how to maintain and articulate a consistent and defensible position on whether Medicare for all would allow private insurance.

If not one of those three, perhaps Trump will be taken on by a 38-yearold mayor of South Bend, Ind., by the name of Pete Buttigieg.

There is no one in the Democratic field with the outsider and newcomer appeal of Jimmy Carter, or the political talent of Bill Clinton, or the inspiration of Barack Obama, or the resume and toughness of Hillary Clinton.

Yet Trump works overtime to define his real opponent as something wildly peripheral—“The Squad,” meaning four first-year Democratic congressional women who hold extreme views.

They are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They’re the ones Trump has told to go back where they came from.

The women want to do away with, or at least de-fund for a time, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service. The four are allin for the “Green New Deal,” a set of climate-change responses that scares middle America.

Democrats, in the main, do not share those views. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resists the views and the women. The Democratic presidential candidates pat the four women on their heads, basically. They seek not to lose the passion of the women and their supporters, but not to be burdened by their polarizing effect, either.

Yet Trump’s plain objective by his horrid behavior in recent days is to anoint those four women as his Democratic opposition, presumably because he holds no confidence against Biden, Warren or Harris.

Consider this paragraph in a Washington Post piece Monday: “At a weekly meeting of Senate Republican communications aides, a White House official, Brad Bishop, encouraged the GOP staffers to emphasize a fresh message focusing on the four Democrats, according to two people in attendance: that the liberal lawmakers need to start helping their constituents, rather than focusing on unpopular issues such as impeaching Trump or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Perhaps more tellingly, Trump assails the four women for opposing “humanitarian aid,” by which he means the $4.6 billion border bill that the House passed last month.

The four women said there weren’t enough controls in the bill on how the Trump administration could spend the money.

But, more to the point, please notice the phrasing—the bill passed the House, which has Democratic leadership and a Democratic majority. Yet Trump seeks to make voters afraid of four women who voted on the distantly losing side.

This is not altogether a new political tactic, especially for Republicans.

George H.W. Bush trailed Michael Dukakis by 17 points coming out of the conventions in 1988; by the end of the campaign, Bush was running less against Dukakis than a convicted killer named Willie Horton who had been furloughed during Dukakis’ governorship of Massachusetts.

That tactic, like Trump’s now, seemed racist.

With John McCain in trouble against Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans ran against Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose fiery preaching had cursed America. That wasn’t without race implications, either.

But there are a couple of clear differences.

One is that surrogates attacked Horton and Wright while Trump does his attacking himself. The other is that Horton and Wright became issues late in the general election while Trump is trying to make these four women the issue pre-emptively, six months before the first primary.

There are but two explanations. One is that Trump, as we know, is an entirely different kind of political being. The other is that he must be afraid … of Biden, Warren, Harris. Really. Oddly.

Imagine how he’d behave if he the Democrats had a good candidate.