Last night and today, the Jewish people observe our saddest day of the year, the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, known in Hebrew as Tisha B’Av.

We Jews commemorate on this day the destruction of both our Temples in Jerusalem, the First by the Babylonians, the Second by the Romans.  We fast and pray for the coming if the Messiah.

And with the announcement this morning of the worst economic quarter in modern American history, this is a day of Lamentations and Mourning for my former party, the Republican Party.  I will always remember today as the Republican Tisha B’Av.

My Republican Party was the party of four of the greatest presidents in American history, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan.  Today, it is the party of the worst president in American history, a vile and corrupt fascist and racist by the name of Donald Trump.

The US economy contracted by 32.9% between April and June, its worst drop on record, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said today.  The failure is due to the criminally negligent mismanagement of the Coronavirus crisis by Donald Trump.

This announcement today followed a week in which Trump racism reached its zenith, with his efforts to resegregate America.  He is doing this by attempting to effectively block working class African-Americans from achieving their suburban American residential dream:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/us/politics/trump-suburbs-housing-white-voters.html?referringSource=articleShare

This latest Trump imitation of George Wallace should surprise nobody.  Trump has a lifetime record of blatant bigotry against African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

Examples of Trump racism abound: His leadership in the “birther” movement, his campaign for the death penalty for the Central Park Five even after their innocence was proven, his discrimination against African-Americans in the rental of his housing units in Brooklyn in the 1970s, his attempts to bar a distinguished American jurist, Gonzalo Curiel from presiding over the Trump University fraud case on the basis of his Mexican ancestry.

Americans are a good and decent people.  The American electorate will soundly reject Trump racism.

Yet on the same day that the economic catastrophe was announced, Trump is trying to save himself with an act right out of the Trump fascism playbook.  He is is for the first time floating a “delay” to the November 3 presidential election, as he makes unsubstantiated allegations that increased mail-in voting will result in fraud.

He won’t get away with this.  Americans, Black and White, will take to the streets in massive numbers in peaceful protest, bravely disregarding the threat from the Trump Stormtroopers that so recently menaced Oakland, California.

This is Trump’s attempt to steal the election.  It will fail.  Our Constitutional system is a government of laws, not of men.

In the words of the Willie Nelson song, for Donald Trump, the song is “Turn out the lights…the party’s over…,”

I just finished Mary Trump’s book on her Uncle Donald.  My interpretation (not hers): Trump is a coward who can’t take the prospect of the tsunami-scale defeat that awaits him and his GOP.

Prior to Labor Day, after finding a suitable phony pretext, Donald Trump will resign.

Alan J. Steinberg served as Regional Administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush and as Executive Director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.