Donald Trump is a quitter

Now that the Democrats have won control of the House and are preparing to unleash a blue wave of subpoenas, just as Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing to unleash his own tidal wave of indictments and arrests, even Donald Trump seems to have figured out that this can’t possibly end well for him. Trump is acting like a guy who knows he’s going to lose. So now what? It helps to take a look at what Trump has done the last several times he’s been in a situation like this during the course of his life.

Donald Trump has lost many times over the years, in business, in real estate, you name it. His exit strategy tends to be consistent: once he realizes he’s going to lose, he looks for a way to negotiate the least bad ending for himself, and then declares victory and walks away. For instance, when Trump was no longer able to keep his Atlantic City casinos afloat with money laundering alone, he bankrupted them both, and then bragged about how he was smart enough to get out before Atlantic City collapsed entirely.

Back in the real world, Atlantic City never really did collapse. It’s not exactly thriving, but to date, only four of the city’s fifteen casinos have gone under, and two of them had Trump’s name on them. The other eleven are clearly being run by people who have better business acumen than Trump and his partners ever did. The point is that Trump got to tell himself, and his suckers, that he won by losing. In fact this is a guy who’s used bankruptcy to quit and walked away from failed projects six different times over the years.

The thing is, Trump always wants something in return when he agrees to walk away from his failures. His bankruptcies have allowed him to skip out on the debts he’s run up while failing. In other instances, when companies have licensed his name for a product, only to find that it was a bad idea, he’s demanded payoffs in exchange for letting them out of the deal early.

So when it comes to Donald Trump’s presidency, which he now seems to be beginning to understand is doomed, there is every reason to expect that he’ll end up taking the same approach. He’ll offer to resign, but he’ll want something in return. Most likely, he’ll seek partial immunity on federal criminal charges for himself and his family. Trump knows he can’t beat Mueller and a Democratic House, but he’s probably arrogant enough to be willing to take his chances on state level charges.

The question will be whether Mueller, Congress, the Department of Justice, and the other power brokers are going to be willing to give Donald Trump such a deal, or if they even legally can give him what he’s asking for, and if the public would be willing to go along with it. Trump is a quitter. In fact he’s a career quitter. He’s so toxic, people have been caving to his demands just to get him to go away for his entire life, and he knows it, and he tries to milk it. So of course resignation is on the table. It’s just a matter of whether everyone else involved is willing to give him what he wants, or even part of what he wants, in return.