Donald Trump tips off that he’s scared to death of going to prison
Donald Trump announced this weekend that he’s just fine with going to prison, if that’s what Judge Juan Merchan ends up deciding to do at sentencing. Trump has made this claim before. But don’t let him fool you.
About two weeks into this trial, Merchan informed Trump that if he violated his gag order again, he’d consider immediately throwing him in jail. After this moment, Trump spent the rest of the trial sheepishly abiding by his gag order. It was clear that Trump was desperately afraid of getting locked up.
If you go back to the E. Jean Carroll civil trial before that, once Judge Kaplan threatened to lock Trump up for his attacks on Carroll, Trump sheepishly stopped doing it for the rest of the trial. It wasn’t until after the trial ended, and the gag order disappeared with it, that Trump resumed attacking Carroll. Carroll can bring a new case against him for it, and she might. But the point is that any time a judge has said “Stop doing this for this period of time or you’ll be locked up,” Trump has obeyed. As hard as it is for him to control himself, or to even remember what’s going on, he sure does fall in line whenever incarceration is threatened.
It’s the same thing now. Trump can claim all he wants that he’d like to be locked up. And the doomsday pundits will once again tell us that Trump is trying to get himself briefly locked up, because it would somehow magically cause him to win the election. But none of this lines up with what we’re actually seeing from Trump. He’s scared to death of being locked up.
More to the point, if Trump was that afraid of getting locked up for a night or two for a gag order violation, then he’s certainly even more afraid of getting handed a real prison sentence for the guilty verdict.
If Trump goes to prison, even if it’s just for fourteen days or something, it’ll further drive home to persuadable voters that he really is a criminal and a felon. There are people on the right who can’t decide whether to vote for Trump or stay home. There are people in the middle who can’t decide whether to vote for Biden or stay home. If Trump gets locked up, even for a short time, it’ll steer both those groups away from Trump.
Also, Trump can’t handle going to prison. He’s visibly feeble, he’s in extremely poor health, and he’s suffering from symptoms consistent with severe dementia including delusional paranoia. There’s no way this guy survives even a very short prison sentence without it further shattering his physical and cognitive health – and he seems to know it.
