Donald Trump just figured out he’s going to lose. Now what?

| 5:30 pm EDT April 17, 2020
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At no point during Donald Trump’s presidency has he had an approval rating that was anywhere even close to what would be required to get reelected. He’s spent the past three years trying every antic he can think of, in the name of boosting his approval rating. None of it has helped him one bit.

Trump has always been on track to lose in 2020. And if he loses, he’ll go to prison, with New York State and the Feds fighting over who gets to handcuff him first. From the minute Trump took office, the reality is that his life was very probably over. The only thing he’s still had going for him is the same hope that any losing candidate has of things turning around before the election.

I’ve long wondered – and feared – what would happen if Trump ever reached a point where he concluded that his odds of reelection were slipping away and weren’t going to bounce back. Imagine a madman on the run who knows his odds of escape are small. Now imagine that madman finally realizes there’s no escape and it’s over for him.

This isn’t some dark science fiction movie, so Trump isn’t going to pull out a magic wand and magically save himself when he realizes he’s toast. Instead he’s going to start self destructing in front of our eyes, because he no longer has any hope to keep him even slightly in check, and in fact he has nothing to lose.

I would argue that Donald Trump’s “liberate” tweets today – direct calls on his part for his most deranged of supporters to violently overthrow the Democratic governors in three states – are a sign that he’s concluded he’s going to lose. So now he’s just going to cause as much trouble as possible. For all his threats and bombast, Trump has consistently proven himself not to be a man of action. But until now he’s never been cornered in such a way that he knows his life is over. Maybe he wants to go out with a bang. Maybe he’ll just keep psychotically whimpering. We’ll see what he does next. His press conference later today should be rather telling.