Gee, what a surprise: The weak snowflake who felt strong back when he was busting into teen queen dressing rooms suddenly fled to a bunker and turned off the exterior lights when life got real.

Nobody’s home at the White House. Donald Trump has nothing constructive to say to the nation he has so wantonly destabilized. He has been stripped of all moral authority; in that sense, his presidency is over. Some of his deluded aides, and some Trump critics still suffering from 2016 PTSD, believe that the current unrest will play into his hands and propel him to re-election on a “law and order” platform, but I’ll risk the prediction that it ain’t gonna happen.

This isn’t 1968, when Richard Nixon successfully played that card. Lest we forget, Nixon was the challenger, running against the party in power. This year is different. As Daniel Larison, senior editor at The American Conservative magazine, points out, “Trump is the incumbent, and he will be the one held responsible for the country going to hell.”

Trump in his Inaugural speech, delivered a demagogic promise to halt “American carnage.” But he has since done everything to divide us further, giving aid and comfort to racists (including those in law enforcement), and now he’s reaping the whirlwind. The conservative Washington Examiner wrote this weekend that “as the incumbent, it’s much harder to run on a message to restore law and order when major American cities descended into chaos under your watch…why would he be able to do so in a second term?”

In times of crisis, Americans traditionally have turned to the guy on top (no women yet) for appropriate words of unity, healing, and inspiration. Trump strikes out on all three. How can he possibly heal on race relations when, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll, 57 percent of Americans believe that he’s racist? (I suspect that one of Trump’s weekend tweets – “MAGA loves the black people” – is not gonna cut it.)

And he still doesn’t get it, because his narcissism gets in the way. This passage, in a new Times story, is hilariously depressing (or depressingly hilarious): “While Mr. Trump has been a focus of anger, particularly among the crowds in Washington, aides repeatedly have tried to explain to him that the protests were not only about him, but about broader, systemic issues related to race…”

This is not 2016, when a small but fatal share of voters took a flyer on Trump because they hated Hillary more. Trump has a track record now (such as it is), and because of that record, he’s hemorrhaging support from independents, seniors, and suburban women. According to the newly released ABC News-Washington Post poll, he’s trailing Joe Biden among seniors by 10 points (he won them easily in ’16), trailing among independents by 23 points (he won them easily in ’16), and trailing among suburban women by a whopping 31 points.

Check out this insider report from Axios: “People close to the president, including several senior White House officials, have privately expressed concerns that his incendiary response to the Minneapolis riots will hurt him with two groups that could remove him from office in November: independents and suburban women.” Too late. Besides, incendiary rhetoric is what he does and all he knows. One Trump official confessed to Axios, “You’re definitely going to see the law and order, tough guy rhetoric amp up in the coming days.”

Richard Nixon, as president, tried that tactic during the 1970 midterm campaign. In his bid to help Republicans gain seats on Capitol Hill, he nationalized the midterms, seeking to make them a referendum on “law and order.” There were warning signs that his gambit wouldn’t work – a Harris poll in September found that only 39 percent of Americans liked Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric – and indeed it didn’t work. The Democratic House stayed solidly Democratic, Nixon’s party gained only two seats in the still-Democratic Senate, and Democrats won 11 new governorships.

As historian Rick Perlstein noted the other day, “When disorder is all around them, voters tend to blame the person in charge for the disorder – and, sometimes, punish those who exploit it for political gain.” (Let’s throw in another 2020 factor. When a pandemic kills 105,000 Americans with the promise of killing many more, voters are most likely to blame the person who was ostensibly in charge but asleep at the switch.)

Nixon, in the 1968 presidential campaign, had more flex with the “law and order” rhetoric because he was the challenger. But this year, the challenger is the guy who talks about healing. And while Trump has hiding inside with the exterior lights switched off, Joe Biden hit the streets to talk with protestors. He posted this message on Instagram:

“We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us. We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us. We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us. The only way to bear this pain is to turn all that anguish to purpose.”

That’s what a president would sound like, if we turn the lights back on.