Donald Trump’s delusional new fantasy about being “reinstated” in August shows that he knows it’s all over for him

| 12:25 pm EDT June 1, 2021
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We’ve heard Donald Trump’s biggest remaining apologists, including Mike Lindell and Sidney Powell, publicly claim that Trump will somehow magically be “reinstated” in the Oval Office by this August. It’s not surprising they’d resort to proposing something so silly and impossible; their relevance is fading, and this is the only way they can still get occasional headlines.

But now we’ve reached a different place. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (yes that Maggie Haberman) tweeted this today: “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information).”

It’s not entirely clear if Donald Trump is floating this “August” nonsense because he’s reached a point of desperation where he honestly believes it, or because he’s reached a point of desperation where he’s decided he has to float something like this to try to remain relevant. Either way, it’s coming just days after Trump learned that a New York grand jury is in the process of criminally indicting him on the kinds of straightforward financial charges that nearly always result in conviction. In other words, Trump is pushing the fantasy about being “reinstated” this summer because he knows that his life as he knows it is about to be over anyway.

To be clear, there is no scenario where Trump magically retakes power this August. We trust we don’t even have to explain why this isn’t a million miles from being a real thing. But once Trump is indicted and arrested at some point this year, it’ll help bring an end to his faint hope of making a comeback in 2024. So now he’s reduced to floating a magical fantasy about somehow retaking the presidency before he’s arrested.

Is this dangerous? Of course. It’s extraordinarily disturbing that a former United States President would publicly float the idea of forcibly retaking control of the country via a coup. But it’s not something that he can magically make happen by sending his goons to storm the Capitol again; all that would do is put more of his goons behind bars. All that Trump’s new fantasy really does is reveal that he knows his life as he knows it is over. Desperate people, when they run out of realistic hope, tend to resort to particularly delusional fantasies to comfort themselves. Trump is clearly out of hope.