Just before Election Day, Trump takes another swing at the system, making it easier to fire civil servants.

With less than a week to go until Election Day, I am wracking my brains to remember if I have ever heard a closing argument as incoherent as President Donald Trump’s, and I can’t.

At one rally in Lumberton, North Carolina, Trump again bemoaned what he believes to be a mega-conspiracy to hype the coronavirus just long enough to ensure his election defeat.

He said that for the television news programs, it was all “Covid, Covid, Covid” – and then added bitterly that if a plane with 500 people goes down, the media pays no heed to it.

Ponder that inane comment for a moment, coming as it did on the day America posted a high of more than 83,000 new coronavirus cases.

First, the idea that the media routinely ignores mass-casualty plane crashes is simply untrue.

Second, the daily death toll has been the equivalent of between one and three packed 747 planes going down in mid-flight. At this point, to push Trump’s offensive analogy, the country has lost more than 440 jumbo jets’ worth of passengers, with hundreds more on the runway.

Trump might not want to see it, but that vast scale of devastation is precisely why the media and the general public are paying close attention to the pandemic and to the administration’s criminally inept response.

No. 45, by contrast, is focusing on other things.

He is, for example, reveling in the vast power grab Senate Republicans have carried out this past month in their Operation Warp Speed effort to hold hearings for and confirm – a week before Election Day – a new Supreme Court justice. All in one-tenth the time that majority leader Mitch McConnell sat on the Merrick Garland nomination back in 2016.

And Trump is using his executive-order pen to lock into place new hiring-and-firing practices for federal employees that will, if he is reelected, inevitably lead to a Trumpification of almost the entire civil service, since they will permit what are, in essence, political loyalty tests and purges for huge numbers of career officials. The executive order in effect strips much of the civil service workforce of union protections, and if anyone is deemed to be a “poor performer” – read, non-loyalists – makes it far easier to fire them.

This really is banana republic territory. In fact, the change is so stunning in its implications, so destructive of the very concept of a professional, politically independent federal bureaucracy, that in most weeks it would have dominated the headlines and created huge pushback pressures. But this week, it became a reality that received almost no public attention.

There is no room for complacency in these final days, no room to simply assume that things will work out in this election, in which everything is at stake. If you haven’t yet voted, do so. For the larger margin against him, the harder it will be for Trump to successfully implement his democracy-destroying, burn-it-all-down strategy.

SASHA ABRAMSKY writes regularly for The Nation, and is the author of several books, including Inside Obama’s Brain and The American Way of Poverty.