Tim Walz got off one of the better lines of the summer when he was told Donald Trump was thinking about making a stop at 38th and Chicago, at the George Floyd memorial, while in Minnesota rousing the rabble a week or so back.

Said Walz, “That is a really bad idea.”

The Governor of Wisconsin and the Mayor of Kenosha are saying the same thing today as Trump prepares to inflict himself into a roiling cauldron of rage tomorrow. After spending Sunday re-tweeting sympathizers of the 17 year-old wanna-be cop/Trumper who killed two people with his (illegal) AR-15, it’s not likely Trump is going to Wisconsin to defuse the race war bomb he’s been packing for the last four years.

He wants more rage. He needs more rage.

At this point it’s realistic, and not at all cynical to believe Team Trump is eager for video of protests and riot-like violence around him in Kenosha, especially if the protestors are black. The starting gun for the final stage of what we’ve all known will be the ugliest, most shameful and embarrassing presidential campaign in American history has been fired. And Trump’s strategy, maybe his last best strategy and his latest assault on common decency, is selling suburban America on the idea that inner city blacks are coming for their property.

And it will work to some extent.

For all the revulsion and disgust of Trump by college-educated suburban women, there are enough of them — 10%-15%, who knows — with a fragile enough sense of security, they will gamble that despite all evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump is the better bet to restore “law and order.” The better bet to keep scary-looking black people off their lovingly manicured lawns. Their husbands, polls tell us, will take even less convincing.

I still believe that given robust voter turn-out and ineffective meddling by Russia and other bad actors, Joe Biden will win. Or, to re-purpose Trump, “The only way I win is if it’s rigged.”

But prone as I am to dystopian fantasies I’ve spent too much time churning over scenarios like this:

Following several weeks of protest and counter-protests, (think this past weekend in Portland, Oregon muliplied a couple hundred times), with muddied results from mail-in ballots challenged at every turn by Trump/Barr lawyers and judges, a consensus finally emerges that Trump has in fact lost. He has to vacate the premises.

But … facing a future of ceaseless and financially ruinous criminal and civil indictments, he pitches Biden … The Deal.

“Either”, he says to the President-elect, “you grant me total immunity from any prosecution now or in the future, or I keep up this fight, this all-out culture war.” Essentially, Trump, who is far more important to Trump voters than the stale old Republican party, would be threatening to set up a separate government. A viral, media-driven insurgency, with himself as the wounded, legitimate leader driven from ofice by the “deep state” but supported and served, passionately and reflexively, by literally hundreds of thousands of wanna-be cops. People with an endless supply of bigotry, anger and bullets.

What does Biden do?

Does he take the deal and direct his Justice Department, the attorney general of New York and the SDNY to drop all investigations and prosecutions of Trump and his cronies? Or does he risk what he knows with absolute certainty Trump is willing to do to destabilize Biden’s new government?

Only an idiot would make any kind of deal with Trump expecting him to honor it. But the dilemma remains.

Biden will have to be making every move imaginable to finally get the pandemic under control, which could mean another tougher, nation-wide, mid-winter lockdown. Simultaneously, he will have to prove that genuine police reform has begun across the country. And … and … with Congressional support, he will have to quickly and successfully stimulate an economy all the way down to the bottom 20% to stave off mid-winter evictions, homelessness, rage, suicides … and on and on.

I know what I’d do. It’d be the American version of The Nuremberg Trials.

But that’s why no one’s electing me to anything.