This evening I’ll be gathering with several close friends and my wife Jane for an early birthday meal, a week early. This will be my last food for a month. 12 hours from when I’m writing this I’ll be on my water-only regimen.

But the really big news is that Trump and his immigrant wife Melania have tested positive for COVID-19. As I rode my bike this am, the last time I’ll be doing that for a month and a half or so, I remembered something I once talked about with Jane. I told her that although I would not mourn if Trump got the virus and died, a much better scenario would be that he get the virus bad, be put into the hospital and intubated for many days, recovers eventually after a month or more of suffering, and then, having experienced his mortality and near-death, announces that he has come to realize how evil he was before COVID laid him low. He vows to do all he can to overturn all of the destructive and inhuman policies he had formerly pushed, and he actually does it, even to the point of realizing and publicly calling for fundamental transformation in what he calls “an unjust and destructive system.”

It’s a nice dream. It would be a huge miracle if it happened. It won’t. That’s why we need to be doing everything we can to generate the biggest possible turnout of the people who understand what a threat Trump is to any hope of a decent future for us and our descendants, and to so many people right now.