Is Mr. Trump perhaps getting nervous?

As Joe Biden's double-digit lead in the polls grows and the president broods over his fizzled rally in Tulsa, his obsession about mail-in ballots being an open invitation to fraud (as usual, he has been unable to support his concerns with actual evidence despite widespread use of the system without mishap both in isolated cases here in the United States and overseas) is beginning to fall into an interesting pattern.

It's a given that he will not be able to deal with electoral rejection. He always has an excuse; anything that reflects badly on him must by definition be somebody else's fault. He claimed (again, totally without any evidence) that he lost the popular vote last time because of voting by illegal immigrants; judging from yesterday's tweet, it appears that mail-in voting will be his ready-made excuse for whatever goes wrong this time.

But yesterday's tweet, coming as it does at a time when the storm clouds over Mr. Trump's re-election chances are growing darker and darker, raise questions as to whether at least in this respect the president is beginning to confront reality and is preparing a narrative for the likelihood that he will lose in November. It seems very much out of character that he's not merely insisting that the polls are rigged, and his people are already implausibly blaming the disaster in Tulsa on mischievous teenagers reserving tickets they had no intention of using. It makes sense that he would continue to harp on his unfounded claim that an election in which mail-in ballots are used would inevitably be rigged, to continue to downplay the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic even though it has now killed 120,000 Americans, and even that he would be happy if the more heavily-populated blue states had a lighter than normal turnout at the polls. But there is something about the tone of yesterday's tweet that causes me to sense desperation here.