It is a true revelation, as yet considerably underappreciated, to discover that the essence of Trump’s hold on such a large segment of the U.S. adult population comes from a gut level, existential fear of him from his middle aged straight white male supporters, who react to him as mental and emotional children faced with a terrifying schoolyard bully.

The key to undoing him, therefore, does not lie in any rational undertaking, but in the deprogramming of institutional cowardice within this so-called base. Citing his legal high crimes and other indiscretions does no good in this regard, they will only reinforce his hold on them as a bad person and threat to them.

In this context, Trump gets added support from three added components to this equation. First, there are the selfish self-interested creeps of greed-obsessed capital who see no problem if they raid, dismantle and destroy anything in their path, including democracy, to extract a few bucks and temporal hedonistic jollies. Second, there are the elite among cowards, those of the political world who have their pants down, virtually, and butts extended to acquiesce to whatever perceived “orders” come from the baddest kid on the playground. Third, there are the sworn enemies of American democracy, the foreign powers of Russia and China and their junior partners Iran and North Korea. These entities use their superior profiling and related propaganda and mind-bending techniques to influence the Trump population by feeding their paranoia and fear.

In particular it has been the Russians, with their self-estimated great superiority in matters of human cognition and its influencers, who have spent decades mastering and executing mind-bending techniques, the U.S. population being major guinea pigs, that are the biggest players in this field.

They’ve been assisted in the Trump era by their effective agents of influence in high places, including Steve Bannon, Paul Manifort, Steve Miller, Rand Paul, the rag-tag gang of Trump influencers in Congress, and of course, Trump, himself, Putin counted on a second Trump term to fully carry out his plans for the undoing of NATO with his agent in the White House, but he instead was forced to resort to a messy invasion of Ukraine and now the unleashing of Hamas terrorists to deflect attention away from Ukraine.

Make no mistake, the Trump game plan for holding onto the White House despite losing the 2020 election came directly from Moscow, even up to this very day. Putin fully intends to succeed in placing Trump back into the White House next year, and with that, the long-aspired fall of NATO and Europe.

The combination of brainwashed straight white males resorting more and more to violence and hate crimes, greed-obsessed and anti-democratic business elements. spineless, amoral sycophants in the U.S. Congress and major news media and a full-court press from Moscow’s psychological warfare operations aimed at calling into question the very existence of truth, is and will prove, indeed, very tough to beat.

The major media is doing its part by burying these connections in its ongoing coverage, which only adds to Trump’s viability in the eyes of his base.

So, wherein does our hope lie? It falls squarely on the shoulders of our nation’s women, who have been the only potent force since Trump was first installed in January 2017, who brought out millions to protest his inauguration.

It is amazing to me how few men in high places appreciate this, except to refer to women (“suburban women,” no less) as just one element of a wider constituency that otherwise includes the leadership of mostly white men.

But the abject failure of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin in the state’s midterm elections this month (Democrats won control of both houses) was due to his deluded notion that extending an abortion limit to 15 weeks constituted a “winning compromise.’

Solomon in the Old Testament learned the truth about the proper mother of a child by promoting a compromise of cutting the child in half and giving half to each. The real mother, of course, said no, because the life of the child was more important.

Slicing up a woman’s control of her body, as Youngkin proposed, was similar.