Donald Trump isn’t going to prison. He’s already in prison.
Over the past couple years I’ve somehow become known as the “Donald Trump is going to prison” guy. Of course the story was not that I was willing to say it. The story was that just about no one else in the media or pundit class was willing to say it – which was scandalous, given that it was always the likely outcome. And it came very close to happening. But no, it didn’t happen. So now what?
First, I want to address what all had to go into Trump somehow avoiding prison like he did. First he had to get lucky on a one-in-seven random draw that assigned his espionage case to Judge Aileen Cannon. There was an 86% chance that case could have been randomly assigned to a different judge, and if that had happened, Trump would be in federal prison already. Then Trump had to have the astounding luck of Fani Willis getting caught having an affair with a subordinate who was working on the case, which gave the Georgia Supreme Court the excuse it had been lacking to finally delay the trial. If not for that affair being exposed, Trump would be in state prison already.
Then Trump once again just lucky in an unlikely way when Judge Juan Merchan, who had been a straight shooter throughout the New York criminal trial and conviction, suddenly decided to delay sentencing until after the election for no reason. Without Merchan’s heel turn, Trump would have gone into election day with a prison sentence hanging around his neck, and would have lost, and would have gone to prison.
Trump also got astoundingly lucky in that President Biden had such a severe cold the day of the debate that he ended up taking too much cold medicine and came off incoherently for the first half hour of the debate. If Biden hadn’t been sick, Biden would have won the debate, the media couldn’t have forced him out of the race, Biden would have likely won the election (the presidential incumbency advantage is extremely strong), and Trump would be on his way to prison.
Again, all of the above unlikely things had to happen to keep Trump out of prison. If any one of the above things had gone the other way, Trump would either be in prison or on his way to prison. My prediction was the valid one, because it was overwhelmingly likely to happen. Anyone who predicted that Trump would “get away with it all” was full of crap. For such a prediction to have been valid, the person making it would have needed to foresee an unlikely ping pong bounce, a secret affair, a respected judge going rogue, and someone catching a cold. No one foresaw any of that. The people who said Trump would get away with it all were playing you for effect, and they got very lucky with a ridiculously unlikely prediction that even they didn’t think would play out that way.
Put another way: even with all of the above unlikely things having happened, Kamala Harris still came within about 1% of the vote of winning the deciding swing states. So in the end Trump still came within 1% of going to prison. We were that close to this being over and Trump being in a cage. Again, I stand by the validity of my prediction. It just didn’t play out that way.
All that said, Trump did not end up going to prison. The DOJ is withdrawing its cases against Trump and legally reserving the right to bring them again once Trump is out of office, but does anyone expect a dementia riddled Trump to live that long? The same goes for the state level cases against Trump. They can try him and convict him, but no one is letting a state government put the sitting U.S. President in prison. So again, Trump is presumably only going to prison if he manages to live four more years, or perhaps if JD Vance and the cabinet throw a senile Trump out of office prematurely.
So at this point Trump likely is not going to prison. And that’s tragic, for a long list of reasons big and small. He’s going to do incredible damage to the nation now. We’re going to fight him every step of the way, and we’re going to win some of these battles and preserve some things so we can try to rebuild. We’ve already defeated Trump’s first choice for Attorney General, which proves we can still fight and win. But this is going to be a dark time.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s this: Donald Trump is already in a prison of his own making. He appears to be terminally ill with dementia. He’s often confused and doesn’t know where he’s at. He wanted to live out the rest of his life cheating at golf and having his red hats come to his dump of a home and tell him how great he is. Instead Trump now has to spend the rest of his life stuck in the White House, stuck pretending to work, surrounded by underlings whose identities he can’t remember, confused, bored, frustrated, and depressed. Trump, in his final years or months as dementia kills what’s left of his brain, will suffer along with us. It’s a small consolation. But at this point we’ll take it.
