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Editor's Note: Errol Louis is the host of "Inside City Hall," a nightly political program on NY1, a New York news channel. The opinions expressed in this comment are yours. See more opinion pieces at CNNe.com/opinion
(CNN) - There seems to be virtually no chance that President Donald Trump, faced with a difficult reelection path, will extend to his predecessor, President Barack Obama, the traditional courtesy of a formal White House ceremony to unveil the official portrait of Obama.
Any probability of that, even minimal, seems to have faded with Trump's declining political fortune. If this president showed a prosperous economy and a satisfied population, and was featured prominently in the polls, there could be a possibility that he was magnanimous, and offered the friendly and traditional gesture to his predecessor.
But Trump is on the ropes, taking one political hit after another. And his political instinct, when cornered, is to turn to what worked so well in 2016: disruption, distraction, and division. What is different this time is that Americans are fighting the covid-19 pandemic and suffering from the disorders and, of course, the consequences. No one is looking for a president who turns Washington upside down.
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Trump's usual parlor tricks - fighting celebrities, assigning child nicknames to political opponents - have become outdated at a time when millions are looking for work and worried about the threat to their families' health.
That leaves Trump with his most basic movement: racial division. In 2015, he went down the escalator at Trump Tower and referred to Mexican immigrants as "rapists" ("and some, I suppose, are good people," he said). He seemed to delight in religious intolerance during that same year, demanding "a complete and complete closure of Muslims entering the US".
But the North Star for Trump is the racial appeal of targeting the constant snubs and attacks on the nation's first black president, Barack Obama. Apparently out of nowhere, Trump and his faithful echo chamber on Fox News have invented a conspiracy theory called "Obamagate."
There is no particular logic for Obamagate, which more or less boils down to an unsubstantiated claim about an alleged "coup" led by Obama to sabotage the Trump presidency. There has to be no logic. In fact, when a journalist pressured him to explain the matter, Trump was reluctant to try.
We are likely to see more attacks on Obama as Trump searches for a strategy to reverse the serious challenges he faces while trying to get reelected. It was clear that the odds do not favor Trump, even before reports of the president - infuriated by falling poll numbers a few weeks ago - were yelled at his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, on the phone.
It seems like a lifetime ago, but Trump was recently charged. He is only the third president in history to bear that indelible mark of scandal.
He has desperately marred the response to the coronavirus crisis. Reckless promises to the camera in February that the virus "is going to go away" have been followed by the promotion of quack remedies from the White House podium.
Covid-19 has already claimed more than 91,000 lives in the US, is spreading rapidly, and is likely to increase again in the fall, according to the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA, Robert Redfield.
Trump presides over a country with the highest unemployment rate in the last 80 years, over 20%, and knows that a deep economic recession in an election year was politically fatal the last three times - when the presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush - did not receive voter support.
The President knows that he loses his endorsement. He follows Democrat Joe Biden in national polls and in undecided states that Trump led four years ago, including Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
So we go back to basics for a man whose political career, let's remember, was based on the birtherism lie: the conspiracy theory, constantly promoted by Trump, that Obama was born in Africa and was never legitimately elected.
Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates stripped that reality bare in a PBS documentary. "There was a great deal of resentment that a black family has been in the White House for two terms," he said. "I think it would be naive to ignore it: the irony that one of the legacies of the Obama presidency was enormous resentment."
Unfortunately, it never takes much to fuel the embers of racial resentment and hatred in this country. But that is Trump's strategy. He is playing with the racial card because he is politically weak.
Barack Obama