My most profound travel experience came almost 50 years ago at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Especially jarring was the vibe of claustrophobia. Imagine eight innocent people hiding in eight rooms for two tense years while Nazis hunted them down only because they were Jews.

Every now and then, even Donald Trump tells the truth, sometimes accidentally in a rhetorical question. This occurred last Wednesday morning when the felonious former Republican president crowed to a crowd in Florida after beating Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election for the White House. “Look what happened,” the 78-year-old demagogue said as he extended his arms wide to his cheering cult.

When a loose cannon like Donald Trump bellows at campaign rallies that “the world is on fire” and that we are “on the verge of World War III,” it is easy to dismiss his hot spew as more lava from a verbal volcano. But when an authentic conservative elder like George F. Will objectively opines that this very war is already underway, it is worth considering his intellectual take with some serious thought — as well as fear for what is to come. Israel’s air attack on Iran over the weekend brought this thought into sharp, troubling focus.

When Donald Trump’s microphone stopped working for about 15 minutes during a presidential campaign speech in downtown Detroit on Friday night, you had to wonder what the Republican candidate might have said or done in that precious but lost quarter-hour. He might have praised the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, the way he did Saturday night in a Pennsylvania speech that went beyond cringy. He might have insulted the Motor City again, the way he did in the previous week at the Detroit Economic Club, when Trump said the election of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris would make the whole nation as bleak and desolate as Detroit.

Suddenly on Saturday, the Tigers stopped hitting well. Then, they stopped pitching well. And they stopped fielding well, too.

By insulting his host city in his speech last Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club, convicted felon and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump figuratively pinned a “Kick Me!” sign on the backside pocket of his baggy, blue suit. Quick to take the bait on Friday were two elected Michigan Democrats, Attorney General Dana Nessel and State Senator Mallory McMorrow of Royal Oak, both on Deadline: White House on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace. Nessel suggested Trump should contest his many court cases with a plea of his own insanity and demand a competency hearing.

At a Democratic campaign rally in Flint on Friday night, Vice President Kamala Harris warned of what could come after Nov. 5 should former Republican President Donald Trump win their Election Day showdown. “If you want to know more about Donald Trump’s plans, just Google ‘Project 2025,’” Harris said, drawing loud booing from the audience that included Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Earvin (Magic) Johnson. “It is a detailed and dangerous blueprint for what he will do if he is elected president,” Harris continued.

During Saturday’s long rain delay at soggy and foggy Comerica Park, the big scoreboard in left field showed glimpses of the Michigan Wolverines down the road in misty Ann Arbor, defending their national college football championship. Despite that visual stimulation, the baseball fans chanted “Let’s go, Tigers!” although the tarp remained on the field and the team had clinched its improbable playoff berth the night before. Some boisterous voices in the grandstands sounded still groggy from the celebration.

Until this month, Tom Jordan co-hosted the morning All Talk show on Detroit’s WJR (760-AM), a “heritage news-talk” radio station broadcast from Detroit’s New Center and, for more than a century, a powerful voice of the Motor City. But that prestigious, 50,000-watt, clear-channel signal no longer broadcasts the voice of Jordan, he says, because he was “blacklisted” by progressive politicians who refused to appear on his biased program. Seems like this talker talked himself out of a talking job.

Shortly after rifle shots wounded former President Donald Trump and killed one of his fans in July at a Pennsylvania rally, the Republican Party held its national convention in Milwaukee to nominate Trump again with Senator JD Vance as his running mate. One of the creepiest moments in Vance’s awkward acceptance speech came when Vance smiled wistfully and recalled what they found in the house of his grandmother after she died. She’d raised him in Ohio.

When playground director Gene Kelty umpired softball games at Hansen Field in the 1960s, he left no doubt about the location of a good pitch. “Stee-RIKE!” he’d call in a voice that carried across the street on Drexel and off the brick walls of St. Martin of Tours church, school, convent, and rectory in Detroit’s southeast corner. “Stee-RIKE!!” Kelty’s voice kept echoing off all those brick houses bordering the playground on Piper, Avondale, and Averhill Court in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood.

Literally and figuratively, Mallory McMorrow of Michigan threw the book at former Republican president Donald Trump at the Democratic National convention in Chicago last week. Thump! It bumped atop the lectern on the podium when she slammed it down.

Fret not about improving the hitting, pitching, fielding, and payroll of the mediocre Detroit Tigers. Oh, no. Instead, the Ilitch ownership is about to give Motor City baseball fans what they really want and need: Luxury seating and a private club around home plate at Comerica Park so fat cats can pay big bucks for better boxes.

In law school at Yale, Senator JD Vance of Ohio organized study sessions with classmates to examine “Social Decline in America.” His fellow scholars served as a de facto focus group for his hit book Hillbilly Elegy. One reading assignment Vance ordered was a lengthy essay in The Nation that was published in the mid-1930s about migration of poor, white people from the Southern states to the Motor City to work in the momentarily revived automobile factories during the Great Depression. It was titled “The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit.”

At the mature, old age of 72, the Oxford-schooled Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana is far too wise, much too educated, and way too refined to run his fat mouth like some cocky young punk. But the sharp-tongued Republican chose to do just this last week with personal insults about Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States and the Democratic candidate for president against former President Donald Trump, Kennedy’s fellow Republican. If elected, she would become the first female president and the second of color.

The ride from downtown Detroit to Metro Airport was perfect. The big bus left on time. It arrived on time.

By accepting the figurative gold watch of retirement and dropping his reelection bid Sunday, President Joe Biden gave his Democratic Party a powerful chance in November’s election to not only sweep government leadership at the federal level but also to win big in local races around the 50 states. Such a wave could be led by his obvious replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, who might become both the first female chief executive and the second person of color to win the White House. Against former Republican President Donald Trump, the former prosecutor Harris would oppose a convicted felon and a bellicose bully who is a proud, racist, sexist, white man with issues of impulse control and ego.