Trump is expected to lay the predicate tonight for declaring a national emergency in the weeks leading up to the mid-terms, whereby to snatch electoral victory from what now seems ever more likely to be the jaws of resounding defeat.

He won’t be talking about the brilliant success of his war in Iran (and how he plans to end it) . . . or about rising prices and a likely Fed rate hike before the election.

He won’t be talking about the ICE murders or his total rejection of Ronald Reagan’s view of what makes America great.

He won’t be talking about climate change (for those of us enjoying a “real feel” of 100° today, imagine it ten or twenty degrees hotter as he shits down wind farms in favor of fossil fuel combustion) or the need to shut rural hospitals and cut off food assistance to hungry children, veterans, elderly, and the disabled in order to fund further tax cuts for billionaires.

He won’t be talking about the billions he’s made since re-taking office or the Epstein files he campaigned on releasing.

Apparently, he’ll be talking about how the 2020 election was stolen.  (Oddly, on his watch as president.)  And the need to assure it not be stolen again.

When he won in 2016, while a Democrat was in the White House presiding over things, there was no foreign interference.  (Russia? are you listening?)

And when he won in 2024 (again, while a Democrat was in the White House pulling the strings), the election was legitimate.

But in 2020?

All Georgia needed to do was find him 11,780 votes!  All he asked Mike Pence to do was to throw out the election results!  All he asked his followers to do, some of whom, he knew, were armed, was to march to the Capitol and fight like hell “or we won’t have a country.”  All he did — for hours — while they beat police and ransacked the Capitol for the first time since 1812, was watch on TV and rerun the most violent parts.

His aim tonight I’m told will be, as I say, to lay the predicate — plant the seed — to get the conspiracy theorists foaming.  To tell his MAGAns that honoring the will of the people — who clearly love what he’s doing! don’t we? — can only be achieved by changing the way we conduct elections.

It’s crazy.

More than 60 judges (62 out of 63, if memory serves, the lone exception being a technical footnote) — many of them Trump appointees — threw out all his claims of 2020 election fraud as unfounded.

And yet he knows he won “by a landslide,” refuses to hire anyone who disputes his 2020 win, and is fast turning our precious, cherished democracy into a fascist kleptocracy.

He will fail — as Orban did in Hungary, where the opposition landslide was just “too big to rig.”

But it’s profoundly dangerous; and will only fail if we all lean in more heavily than we ever have before.

I’m an investor in Just Ice Tea (justice tea — get it?) the successor to Honest Tea (get it?) — both of which sport little messages on the inside of the bottle caps.  The one I’m looking at now, from an ice-cold bottle of Moroccan Mint, is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Stay cool.