President Donald Trump does not like being told what to do. To be fair, very few people ever do. But Trump usually goes his own way and blows off those telling him he must do this or mustn't do that, and things have generally worked out for him in the end anyway. This week, however, was markedly different.

Trump is obviously being told -- over and over again -- that he is going to lose the upcoming election to Joe Biden because the public just does not trust him to handle the current coronavirus crisis (or any other crisis, for that matter). Trump's political advisors evidently made that plain to Trump this week, and forced him to chart a radically different course, in the hopes of salvaging his chances in the election.

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That's a fun headline to write, mostly because the flip side of: "Democrats In Disarray" has now become an actual cliché, due to its overuse by the media (especially when the facts don't actually justify its use). But at this point, even just calling what the Grand Old Party is going through "disarray" is being polite. "Meltdown" might come closer to the truth.

This is not an isolated phenomenon, either. It's happening all across the Republican Party. Everywhere you look, there is nothing but dysfunction to see. The White House (obviously) doesn't know what it's doing, the Senate Republicans can't agree among themselves, the Senate and the White House dithered for an entire week and produced no consensus coronavirus relief bill, House Republicans seem to be ready to mount a mutiny against one of their own leaders, and just now President Donald Trump had to sadly admit that the Republican convention was pulling out of Jacksonville, Florida -- where he had moved it in a snit over being told he had to follow rules to keep people safe.

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New York's recent primary election uncovered a problem with mail-in voting that (thankfully) has a very easy fix. Democrats in Congress who are now just beginning negotiations with Senate Republicans and the White House over the next coronavirus relief bill should take note of this problem and proactively fix it -- not just for New York, but for all the states. Thankfully, unlike a lot of voting problems, the fix for this one comes relatively cheap. In a bill whose total cost will likely be between $1 trillion and $3 trillion, fixing this problem is no more than the equivalent of finding some spare change in the couch cushions. So it really shouldn't even be all that hard to achieve.

There's really no blame at all for what happened -- ironically, the problem in New York arose because the state actually proactively did the right thing. Voting rights groups have listed several criteria for how to properly and fairly institute mail-in voting, and one of these is "provide pre-paid postage." In other words, even the cost of a stamp should not be a barrier for voters to have to overcome. The return envelope should already be paid for, so anyone can just easily drop it in the mail. To its credit, New York did so. Many other states have not taken this step yet, putting New York at the forefront of providing easy mail-in voting for its citizens in this regard.

However, an unforeseen problem developed, through nobody's real fault at all. The envelopes were marked as "business reply mail" up in the corner where a stamp usually goes. This is a longstanding method for businesses to provide pre-paid postage, which usually works out just fine for everyone. This time, however, it didn't. The post office normally doesn't bother to postmark such mail (which saves them time and money in the sorting and processing facilities). However, New York -- like many states -- has voting laws which specifically state that a mail-in ballot has to be postmarked by the date of the election. Because thousands of New York ballots were not in fact postmarked, they were not counted.

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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.

Dr. Fauci has already achieved what can accurately be called "rock-star status" with the public. He was just on the cover of InStyle magazine. He has been openly proposed as People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" for the year. He will almost certainly be a frontrunner for Time magazine's "Person of the Year" award, as well. And he's about to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals season opener (apparently because he favors wearing a Nats face mask on television). His public polling numbers for approval and trustworthiness are through the roof, and are the envy of every politician everywhere. In short, the people not only trust Dr. Fauci, they love Dr. Fauci. Rarely has any scientist held such widespread esteem with the general public, in fact (at least in modern times).

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Watching President Donald Trump get interviewed by Chris Wallace on yesterday's Fox News Sunday was certainly instructive (and that's being as polite as I possibly can be). Not only did Trump display a staggering ignorance of the basic facts of the coronavirus pandemic crisis currently unfolding right before everyone's eyes, he also exhibited the same staggering level of ignorance on any number of subjects. Amusingly, Wallace fact-checked the president right to his face on several of these, which didn't exactly put Trump in a good light. But the most laughable thing Wallace exposed was Trump's continuing insistence that a mental acuity test he took a few years back was some sort of measure of his great intelligence. Wallace, as politely as he could manage, begged to differ: "It's not the hardest test."

Wallace is right -- it isn't. It is not an I.Q. test, it is not designed to measure intelligence in any way at all. Instead, it tests for major cognitive impairment. The test is a one-page form with several tasks for the patient to perform. One is to draw an analog clock with the hands at 11:10. Another is to identify drawings of various easily-identifiable animals (a camel, or an elephant). There are some basic memory tests as well.

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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.

If Trump actually is interested in beating Biden, he's certainly going about it in the wrong way. Trump had a golden opportunity when the pandemic began, because if he had shown even a modicum of leadership and even a shred of human decency and empathy, the race would right now be a lot closer. If Trump had addressed the nation, admitted the facts, rallied people to fight the pandemic in every way possible, trusted the scientists, urged people to wear masks, developed a national plan to deal with the crisis, and repeatedly helped the nation mourn those we've lost (now at 140,000 and climbing), then Donald Trump would be seen in a radically different light right now. He wouldn't have even had to have been particularly good at any of these efforts -- he could have just mouthed the words off the TelePrompTer, and that likely would have been enough. But he is absolutely incapable of doing so, it seems.

Instead, Trump keeps choosing the worst possible course. He ignored the initial outbreak. He ignored the testing crisis. He ignored the states being crushed under the outbreak. He ignored his own scientists -- or, even worse, contradicted them and actively undermined them. And worst of all, he has almost completely ignored all the suffering and death out there.

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That headline is meant in an ironic way, not a literal one -- since Donald Trump literally "getting schooled" on anything would be impossible, considering his almost-complete lack of the ability to learn new things. Instead, I refer to the president deciding to pick a battle on yet another losing field for him, this time fighting to force school districts to open up in-person classes in a few weeks. Trump would like to get all America's schools back to normal. That's a goal shared by just about everyone, but the problem with Trump's approach is that it comes with a rather large disclaimer at the end: "...whether it is safe to do so or not." This is the bridge that is proving to be too far for America's mothers and fathers.

In any conflict, whether military or political, you've got to pick your battles. You've got to decide what is worth defending to the death and what is not. The problem for Trump is that his campaign (or he himself) has massively misread the issue of school reopenings with the general public.

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Today I am going to spike a football in the end zone. That's as appropriate as a sports metaphor gets, really, because I am celebrating the fact that the Washington Ethnic Slurs football team has finally decided to retire their official team name. They seem to be in some sort of discussions (variously reported as being with Native American groups, the military, or possibly someone who already owns the trademark and/or copyright) about what the new team name will be, but as of Monday they will never be called the "Washington Redskins" ever again. And that is indeed a reason for an end-zone celebration.

Way back in 2007 -- in the first column I ever wrote about sports -- I denounced the Washington Ethnic Slurs and all the other sports teams making piles of money off of exploiting imagery of Native Americans. The Washington team name was the worst offender in terms of language, but the "Chief Wahoo" caricature of the Cleveland Indians won out as the worst of the worst in all of professional sports (for obvious reasons).

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will soon be moving forward on a bill to rein in the presidential pardon powers, to avoid any future president being allowed to do what Donald Trump just did -- abuse this power to grant clemency for a person convicted of lying and witness tampering to protect Donald Trump. A clearer abuse of power would indeed be hard to imagine, unless it was Trump attempting to proactively pardon himself for any and all federal crimes he's ever committed. Which, at this point, isn't outside the realm of possibilities, for Trump. But while Pelosi will be making a little political hay out of the issue, she is actually aiming too low. Because what is really needed is a constitutional amendment.

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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?

Sigh. As I explained a few weeks ago, polling will always have its shortcomings (especially at the state level), but it's really the only thing we've got other than collecting anecdotal evidence on our own. Which is impossible on the scale the Electoral College operates on. Flawed though it may be, state-level polling is still important to keep an eye on, which is precisely what this series intends to do.

The intent of the series is the same as it always has been: to chart the probable Electoral College vote over time. After all, this is the way we elect presidents, but for some reason the political media world loves to focus instead on national polls. As Hillary Clinton (and Al Gore before her) proved, national polling is next to meaningless, because the national popular vote is also next to meaningless. Democrats have won seven out of the last eight presidential popular votes (Bush's second term is the only popular vote the Republicans won), but it didn't stop George W. Bush or Donald Trump from winning the Electoral College.

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