Can't login into phpMyAdmin

Question

I have been battling with this since 9AM and it is past 7:30 PM. My application was not able to communicate with mySQL. So I wanted to make sure I could get into it through phpMyAdmin. I can bring up the login screen(via localhost/phpmyadmin) in my browser, but It won't take my user and password. I've tried stopping it, running sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables &, and then starting it. No dice. when I type mysql at the CLI I get

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

This makes sense since I don't have a /var/run/ directory. I tried mysql -u richb201 -p but I get

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

Is there anyway for me to remove mysql and just reinstall it?

Here is my current mysqld.conf which is NOT in the /run/ directory

[mysqld_safe]
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

nice        = 0

[mysqld]
#
# * Basic Settings
#
user        = mysql
pid-file    = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port        = 3306
basedir     = /usr
datadir     = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir      = /tmp
lc-messages-dir = /usr/share/mysql
skip-external-locking
#

Answer 1

Is there anyway for me to remove mysql and just reinstall it?

Yes there is:

sudo apt remove mysql-server

or

sudo apt purge mysql-server

The latter will ensure that all packages related to the installation are removed including configuration files.

Then to reinstall:

sudo apt install mysql-server

To set mysql root password run sudo mysql_secure_installation command.