The end of Donald Trump

| 9:19 pm EDT August 21, 2018
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After the historic blows he suffered today, any rational President of the United States would be huddled with his legal advisers and trying to figure out how to negotiate his resignation. As we’ve seen time and again, Donald Trump is anything but rational. His presidency died today, and the rest of his life effectively went down the tubes as well. But what will Trump do now?

This is now guaranteed to end very badly for Donald Trump. It’s not just that Paul Manafort’s conviction hands all the leverage to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It’s that Michael Cohen went into court and formally named Trump as his unindicted co-conspirator in a felony violation of federal election law. It’s all downhill for Trump from here, and it’s a rather steep downhill slope. A day like today destabilizes a president to the point that he can’t function, the government can’t function, and the nation can’t function until he’s gone. And after today broke the dam, Trump is only going to have more and more days like this.

So what is Donald Trump’s endgame? He never did try to fire Robert Mueller, and after today’s events, Trump would have a ten times harder time trying to pull it off. Mueller’s legal standing is bolstered now that he’s scored his first set of felony convictions against a Trump-Russia target. And now that Trump is officially a co-conspirator in all this, Trump would be exposing himself to a whole new level of obstruction charges if he were to try firing Mueller.

Trump never has tried to pardon anyone in the Trump-Russia scandal either. Michael Cohen clearly concluded that it was never going to happen when he decided to cut his plea deal. We’ll see if Paul Manafort is under the delusion that a pardon is coming, but as we predicted, Trump distanced himself from Manafort tonight instead of talking about pardoning him. And because Trump is now a co-conspirator, he’d have a much harder convincing the courts to let any attempted pardons stand.

Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have an endgame. Will he simply try to sit there in office and hold out as long as he can, before he’s inevitably ousted? Will he come out swinging in new and desperate ways? The trouble is that Trump’s inner circle, which wasn’t filled with the brightest bulbs to begin with, has largely vanished as his people have resigned, or been fired, or been pushed away, or been arrested. Is there anyone left who can tap Trump on the shoulder, tell him it’s over, and explain to him that his best bet is to try to negotiate leniency in exchange for resignation? We’ll see.