Between a rock and a hard place

| 3:00 pm EDT October 13, 2024
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Former lawyer and Trump fixer Michael Cohen says Trump is terrified. The man who invented the epithet “Von ShtizenPants” to describe his former boss, the man who describes himself as someone who knew Trump “better than anybody,” insists that nothing frightens Donald Trump more than the prospect of going to prison.

Facing that prospect is just three and a half weeks away. On or about the 6th of November, after the votes are tallied and the results are clear, Donald Trump will wake up one morning and face the ultimate music: the very real prospect of going to prison. Twenty short days later he will stand before judge Juan Merchan, whose job it will be to pass sentence for thirty-four felony counts on the disgraced former president. No one but Merchan knows for sure what sentence he will hand down. But it is very likely going to include a custodial sentence of no small consequence.

Thus will complete history’s greatest fall of any one individual from the greatest height. Donald Trump will have scaled the highest mountain of all, the presidency, only to find himself in the deepest pit, prison. As Trump would say, and this time it will actually have some basis in reality, “Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”

To be sure, Trump might not go to prison — this time. But future trials and future sentences loom with a certain inevitability. And each time Trump is sentenced he will no longer face judges with the option to go easy on him. He will be a confirmed and convicted criminal with a rap sheet as long as your proverbial arm.

The very realistic prospect of prison animates the Trump of today. He realises that this election represents what we know it represents. It’s all about survival, his or ours. It’s the ultimate decision point, when everybody’s fate gets decided. Trump’s terror grows with our confidence. Every dark thought, every primordial horror is wrapped up in a single day for all of us.

For Trump it means humiliation, defeat, doom and incarceration. It means losing, with a capital L. It means being defeated, not just by a Democrat, but a woman, not just any woman, but a woman of colour. It means nothing left to stand between him and the adamantine reality of a prison door.

Trump, a man who has never changed a tire, never shopped for groceries, never known a day of privation or struggle for survival his entire life, will suddenly have to face the ultimate hardship. The anonymity and humiliation and powerlessness of prison.

So how will he take it? What choices will he make in the inevitable run up to prison? Will he kill himself? Will he flee the country? Will he go on the run inside the United States?

Those have been questions from the very beginning. None of those choices square with my personal experience with narcissists. First, narcissists don’t kill themselves. Of all the roads in the Yellow Wood, suicide is the road least travelled by the narcissist. Trump will remain his own “favourite president,” and such people really do consider themselves immortal. Besides, suicide is an outward manifestation of defeat, and that road isn’t open to narcissists either.

Will he flee the country? While I am less sure that he won’t run away than I am that he won’t kill himself, I doubt that too. He certainly could. I don’t doubt that Vladimir Putin would probably take him in, if only to enjoy the perverse pleasure of thumbing his nose at the American justice system and establish himself yet again as an arbitrary and somewhat bizarre, brutal dictator. But I don’t think Trump will do that either.

I don’t doubt that Trump will take his case to his corrupt MAGA friends in the United States Supreme Court. There he may be in for a shock. Those hardened criminals will have no further use for him. Freeing Trump will gain them nothing but trouble. They will have their hands full already with Kamala Harris and the greatest Blue Wave in American history and the very real prospect of impeachment or legislative impairment. They will gain absolutely no advantage in blocking Trump’s prison sentences. They have shown time and time again that, while most of them are prepared to accommodate Trump, only two, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, actually love him.

No, Trump will have to face his rock and his hard place alone, without recourse or appeal, for the first time in his life without any way to scam his way out of it. It may take some time, but that’s okay. He will suffer mightily in the meantime, in ways that he has made us suffer. And that, friends and neighbours, is what justice is all about. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.