Donald Trump’s worst fear is overtaking him
There are those who would argue that Donald Trump’s worst fear is being exposed as having never been legitimately wealthy, or having never legitimately won an election, or having dementia. The kicker is that all three of these things have been revealed of late, and while Trump is clearly bothered by them, they’re the kinds of things Trump can rationalize away.
No matter how much evidence or proof there might be, Trump is never going to accept that he’s broke, or that he lost in 2016 and 2020, or that he’s going senile. He can always just rationalize that these things aren’t happening, and he knows it.
That’s why I would argue that Trump’s greatest fear is going to prison. It’s something that he knows he won’t be able to convince himself isn’t happening. He’s not going to be able to pretend that his jail cell walls are actually the walls of Mar-a-Lago. Once he’s finally locked up, all his delusions about being successful and relevant and “getting away with it all” are over. It’ll just be him and the prison bars. And again, he knows it.
It’s why Trump hasn’t violated his gag order in the week since Judge Merchan first brought up jail time. Keep in mind that when the judge warned Trump more explicitly about prison earlier today, it was in relation to gag order violations that Trump committed before the first mention of jail. Since that topic first came up, Trump has been sheepishly abiding by the gag order.
No one knows if that will last. On the one hand, once the judge brought up jail time in the E. Jean Carroll civil trial, Trump shut up about her for the rest of the trial. On the other hand, Trump is more senile and unhinged and incoherently out of control than ever.
But it’s telling that Trump has now gone nearly a full week without directly violating his gag order, because he really does fear going to jail that greatly. Of course abiding by a gag order doesn’t keep you out of prison if you’re convicted, and this is the first of four times in a row that Trump is going on criminal trial. In the end, he’s going to prison – and that scares him more than anything.
