With everything coming at us, an unrelenting pandemic, a long winter lockdown and the most berserk election season any of us have ever experienced, I took eight days away to infuse myself with some Big Sky Montana social distance and peace of mind.

It was a valuable respite … that ended, since returning on Monday … with Donald Trump hyping a witch doctor who believes in “demon sperm”, who says that children should be whipped and claims that some government leaders are “reptilians” and space aliens. That in addition to revealing that in eight recent conversations (eight!) with Vladimir Putin he still hasn’t confronted him about Russian bounties for U.S. troops, and saying that those of us living “The Suburban Lifestyle Drem” no longer have to worry about “low cost housing” moving in next to us, and then this morning twitting that mail-in voting is so fraudulent he may have to “delay” the election.

And that, folks, is just skimming off the top. It leaves out Bill Barr seeing no legal reason why a guy running for reelection can’t accept “foreign assistance” … like from say, oh I don’t know, Vladimir Putin … again.

One easy way to become a master prognosticator is by extrapolating out the most obvious trendlines. For that reason I can’t claim wizardly powers for telling everyone who’ll listen, for months now, that we will enter a period of unprecedented chaos prior to this November’s election. And, for the record, I began saying that before the pandemic and America’s thug-like cop culture set off a new round of racial animosities.

If there’s a primary takeaway from the serene moments sitting on the hood of my rental car in a sprawling, mountain-ringed wheatfield, sipping a beer from the cooler, it’s the conviction that chaos is the only card Trump has left to play, and that it, like everything else about his sordid, fraudulent career, depends on … Vladimir Putin.

As hundreds have pointed out, nothing Trump is doing makes any normal, tactical election sense. Every day he hypes witch doctors, shows indifference to the killing of American soldiers, ignores the death of legendary civil rights leaders, bemoans the loss of confederate statues, sends (a la Putin) anonymous “Little Green Men” into American cities to gin up viral social media videos of “terrorists” and “rioters”, he loses another chunk of rational, functionally intelligent voters.

The thing is, by now he knows that simply hardening and “exciting” the always-Trumper base isn’t going to win … a normal, uncontested election. But what it will do is inflame their fundamentally racist, paranoid passions to the point that they will instinctively respond — passionately and recklessly — to his inevitable claim that the November vote against him was “rigged.”

Since no one ever knows what Trump talks to Putin about, (remember, Dan Coats, former Director of National Intelligence, left office without ever being briefed on what Trump and Putin discussed for two hours alone in Helsinki), it seems fair to suspect a coordination of nefarious strategies for election night chaos has been on the agenda.

And, as we are coming to understand, rather than election night, we are looking at something much more like election month, as mail-in ballots are sluggishly counted, contested and invalidated by legal challenges. My prediction being that Trump will declare victory based on in-person results from a handful of red states and then commence, with Barr’s help, a torrent of legal assaults designed to once again push the decision on a winner to the Supreme Court.

I truly wish I could imagine something more honest and straightforward. Something more respectful of “norms.” But this is the world modern Republicanism — the governing vehicle for rancid, know-nothing tribalism, anti-science voodoo hysteria and hyper-micro legal parsing — has ordained for the majority of the rest of the country.

I wish there was another beer in the cooler.