Welcome to Donald Trump’s resignation endgame

| 9:45 pm EDT September 5, 2018
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Yes, I know. Some of you are already screaming “Donald Trump is too ____ to resign!” But hear me out, because this guy always gives up and goes home when he’s lost – or did you sleep through his six bankruptcies? Trump has been sold out tonight by his own administration, and even worse for him, he’s been boxed in. His own cabinet has discussed ousting him with the 25th Amendment. One of his senior officials blabbed about it in the New York Times. There’s no one he can trust. It’s over, and he only has one card left to play when it comes to negotiating the least awful outcome for him.

We’re already seeing Donald Trump quickly work his way through the stages of denial tonight. First he pretended that the op-ed was a fake. Then he accused the 25th Amendment talk of being “treason” and demanded that the op-ed author be turned in for national security reasons. But even Trump’s remarkably incompetent legal advisers are surely explaining to him right now that the 25th Amendment is literally part of the Constitution, and thus invoking it is automatically a fully legal act.

Trump would have to fire literally everyone in his administration and start over, which is unrealistic to begin with, and would still leave him unsure of whether he could trust anyone. Short of that, if he remains in office, his own people will continue working to sabotage him from every angle, even as his criminal scandals move in on him. The trouble for Trump is that he can’t just resign and go home, precisely because of those criminal scandals. He has to negotiate his way out of this, with the one bargaining chip he has left.

If not tonight, then certainly as these latest developments set off a chain reaction of even uglier developments, Donald Trump is going to figure out that his only remaining play is to offer to resign in exchange for some degree of criminal leniency. In such case he could seek federal immunity on all charges, perhaps willing to take his chances on state level charges. Would anyone in the federal government give him such a deal in exchange for his peaceful resignation? Maybe not. But again, this is a guy who negotiates a bankruptcy every time he figures out he’s about to lose anyway. There’s no reason to expect this to end any differently – even if he does continue beating his chest for a bit before getting down to the business of losing.