You do not want to be Donald Trump this morning. Not with all the money in China. Not even with a trophy wife and kids. You want a deep hole to hide in. You want to become anonymous.How do you collect yourself is there is nothing there to collect? The President is close to running on empty. Why? Because the Russians are still coming. Tax returns are not going away. Tweets are not working. That's three strikes and we have not gotten to the nuclear part or the other tax problem.

The nuclear part is North Korea and we know that when the President needs to act he merely has to cough and a military presence comes around and then there is a nod.

Permission is granted. Go do your thing. Anything is better than more reminders of Russia and those damned returns. Is there a way out of this? What if there is a God?

The North Korea matter

Fatal Math

Baseball season is with us. Three strikes and you're out. There was Syria. There was the mother of all bombs. This is not the math we want to do.

Axios is buzzing about this morning's New York Times meme -- that North Korea is the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion. Well, I watched that crisis unfold and the meme holds little water. Cuba was measured and history credits it as being tenser than it actually seemed at the time.

North Korea is cat and mouse and the real players on both sides are hidden from view. Plus, the iconic figures at the top are real and call the shots. Given the last two weeks, this is more the cliffhanger by far.

Going my way?

It used to be we could hitchhike with some sense that we would survive. Now people lock their door and drive along.

The survival problem is internalized. The amount of risk involved in texting while driving is formidable. The premise of cybercommunities, a planning-the-future body of thought, is that we are evolving more toward text than driving, more toward mind than transit. We will eventually live without cars, despite Elon Musk's best efforts.

But for the moment we face the horrendous mess of having to scrape from highways the remains of those who find it impossible not to text while driving.

Don't even think about it

It would be lovely if the President had an issue that the Democrats would bend on without the Freedom Caucus going ballistic. But clearly, he is not ready yet to become a full-blown centrist. That would, after all, be the good thing to do.

But good is not yet even close to Donald Trump's dance card. So the GOP will slog ahead on health care and continue to suffer the same defeats until the writing on the wall registers. Taxes will wait if we are still here by then
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