Donald Trump’s last stand is collapsing
For the past several years, Donald Trump’s approach to any given situation has been to sit on his hands and do nothing, until he reached a point where he realized he’d already lost the battle, only to then try to make up for it by overreacting after the fact. Now that Trump is in the process of taking some of the ugliest losses of his life, that tendency of his appears to be more on display than ever.
Even with the E. Jean Carroll civil rape trial playing out in Carroll’s favor, and Jack Smith now putting everyone in Trump’s life in front of the DOJ grand jury in a rapid fire buildup to a massive criminal indictment, Trump decided to just ignore it all and go golfing in Europe. If he acted like none of it was real, perhaps it would just all go away.
Then on Thursday, Trump did what he always does. He realized that putting his fingers in his ears and yelling “this is fine” wasn’t actually making anything fine. Carroll now seems poised to win big at trial by default. And Smith, who just finished putting Mike Pence in front of the grand jury, is now putting Trump social media guy Dan Scavino and Trump Organization executive Matthew Calamari in front of the grand jury. And so now he says he’s coming home from Europe early to ‘confront’ Carroll, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
But we all know what’s going on here. Donald Trump realized on Thursday that it’s too late, it’s over for him, he can’t do anything to stop these bodyblows from happening to him. And so he’s rushing home to do.. well, nothing real. He might hold a press conference, or walk into the courtroom and try to give Carroll the evil eye before the judge throws him out, or pull some other superficial stunt. None of it’ll accomplish anything for him. But he’ll at least be able to tell himself that he did something.
As for the Jack Smith endgame, Trump still appears to be trying the fingers in his ears approach to pretending it’s all magically going to work out for him. But with indictments for everything from espionage to wire fraud now appearing to be weeks if not days away, how much longer before Trump belatedly decides to take meaningless “action” in that case as well? Not that there’s anything he can actually do. But then that’s the point. To the extent that all this delusion is Trump’s last stand, it’s collapsing on him pretty rapidly.
