Welcome to the final countdown to the fireworks

| 11:40 pm EST November 19, 2018
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Well, here we are. The midterm elections are over, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is making court filings which spell out that he’s about to pounce within days, Donald Trump knows it’s coming and is combusting accordingly, and the rest of us are all just sort of sitting here waiting for it to happen. There are plenty of other things going on, some of them rather important, but overall this has turned into one of the weirdest vacuums of the Trump debacle yet.

Four days ago, Mueller made clear in writing that one or more people sold out by Paul Manafort were going to get popped in publicly visible fashion within the next ten days. So by the end of this upcoming weekend, we should see people in handcuffs.

Keep in mind that in an investigation into a multi-tier criminal conspiracy, particularly in the latter stages, it’s all about flipping on bigger fish, not smaller fish. So think about who’s bigger than Manafort and set your expectations accordingly. But what happens after this big roundup happens? Donald Trump put Matt Whitaker in place as Acting Attorney General as a last ditch effort at getting in Robert Mueller’s way, but thus far there’s no indication that Whitaker is accomplishing anything, beyond giving comedic fodder to late night talk show hosts. Does Trump have more up his sleeve if Whitaker fails? Each of Trump’s new anti-Mueller schemes has been more ineffective than the last.

The bigger question may be what happens when Donald Trump wakes up less than a week from now and finds that his closest allies and/or his family members have been indicted and arrested. Trump’s behavior this past week has been more about cracking up than about cracking heads. Is he even still coherent enough to come out swinging? What would that look like? Will it be too late too matter? We’re in the final countdown to the fireworks, yet we still don’t know quite what the fireworks are going to look like. Then again, Trump doesn’t have a clue either.