Donald Trump’s desperation comes to a hilt

| 6:59 pm EDT June 4, 2018
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Donald Trump announced this morning that he has an “absolute right” to pardon himself. This came less than a day after his lawyer began talking openly about Trump hypothetically murdering James Comey. We’re clearly entering an alarming stretch that’s going to receive significant attention in the history books. But this is not at all what it may seem. Just ask Richard Nixon, who reached the point where he felt he needed to inquire about pardoning himself, and then resigned three days later.

Trump is almost certainly not going to resign three days from now. Nixon, if nothing else, had the sense to make a graceful exit once he concluded that all his evil plans for saving himself had failed. It ultimately bought him a bit of goodwill once history looked back on him with a long lens. Trump isn’t nearly that smart. But he is that desperate. Look at what he’s really floating here.

Here are the kinds of powers that Trump and his legal team are now claiming he has: the power to avoid being subpoenaed. The power to avoid being tried by a court of law while he’s still in office. The power to pardon himself in order to avoid prosecution. Even setting aside the fact that he has none of these powers, and he has no pathway for seizing any of these powers (the Supreme Court would easily strike him down on all of these), the only things he’s trying to seize here are the tools that would fend off his scandals a bit longer. These are all defensive moves.

Much as Donald Trump would like to be invading Mexico for personal profit, or renaming the Washington Monument after himself, or whatever it is that he would do if he could ever settle in as a dictator, he can’t even focus on those kinds of things. Instead he’s focused entirely on increasingly desperate and unrealistic strategies for staying out of prison. Trump is weaker than ever. Now is the time for the Resistance to ramp up the pressure on this flailing and failing illegitimate president. Even he knows he’s up against a wall.