Is he TRYING to lose?

Donald Trump can't possibly be trying to lose the election on purpose, because even with the Supreme Court's interventions it's pretty clear at this point that he'll be headed to prison (for take-your-pick) if he does.

That said, however: The Trump campaign's closing few weeks has been a nonstop barrage of vile moments seemingly designed to make anyone with a sense of decency recoil in disgust. And that new odiousness really does appear to be an intentional choice.

"I'm gonna do it whether the women like it or not" is a hell of a closing slogan for an adjudicated rapist whose taped sneers that he can "grab them by the p—" are now disgusting a whole new generation of American women.

Trump's in a (immaculately clean) safety vest during those remarks because his campaign arranged to have a photo op of him in the driver's cab of a garbage truck. Whether it was meant as a signal to his base that he really isn't going to be distancing himself from insulting and racist comments by a "conservative comedian" who performed at his fascist-themed Madison Square Garden rally is unclear; the campaign's been trying to manufacture outrage over a quickly-rephrased Biden stutter that included the word "garbage" in it but the only people gullible enough to have fallen for that one are, of course, the people our billionaires have put in charge of our newspaper pages.

The Trump camp has seemingly been going out of its way to produce as many grotesque remarks and pictures as possible in these closing campaign days. It wasn't just at the full-on racist rally. Fellow seditionist "MAGA dating app" founder and former Trump director of White House personnel John McEntee posted a lighthearted video boasting that "we want male only voting," saying that the Constitutional amendment establishing American women's right to vote "might have to go." A Trump ally got permanently banned from CNN after blurting out an insanely racist quip aimed at former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. And Trump's former Immigration and Customs Enforcement head, Tom Homan, popped up for a 60 Minutes interview in which he said the solution for avoiding separating families during Trump's promised mass roundup of immigrants, both legal and not, was that "families can be deported together."

What's going on? Does the Trump camp think it's going to lose, and is now focusing instead on riling up the far-right with explicit racism, misogyny, and violent rhetoric in an attempt to lay the groundwork for widespread violence when that loss comes—all for the purposes of another Jan. 6-styled coup attempt? Do they think Trump now has this in the bag, and all those surrounding him can now show their true, grotesque selves? Do they think it just doesn't matter how many voting groups they insult or stoke terror in during the election's last week, because the Roberts-led Supreme Court will install him as the winner no matter what the vote count turns out to be?

Or are they just what they've always been—viciously mean and almost impossibly incompetent, so much so that it's impossible to hide?