Dope springs eternal
By now, anyone closely following the saga knows that even if House Republicans do manage to trigger a government shutdown, it wouldn’t impact Jack Smith’s probe. Given what he has to lose, you’d think Donald Trump would be paying closer attention than anyone, and would therefore know better than anyone that there’s no such thing as defunding Jack Smith.
Instead, Trump is now ratcheting up his efforts to push House Republicans to shut down the government in order to save him from Jack Smith. We know this because he keeps spelling it out on social media in exact words.
You’d think that someone around Trump – his attorneys, or his remaining political advisers – or even House Republicans themselves – would simply say to him, “Hey this isn’t a real thing.” Is no one around Trump daring to break this to him? Or is he simply incapable of hearing it?
You really have to wonder. Trump’s odds of magically surviving all of this are pretty close to zero. But if he keeps spending his limited remaining time and political capital on imaginary solutions, his odds drop to literally zero. His hope of survival depends on him understanding that shutting down the government won’t interrupt his criminal prosecution. Yet he appears to be completely removed from the reality of the situation.
It’s possible that, with Trump already a goner anyway, his handlers and allies prefer to simply tell him what he wants to hear rather than risk upsetting him with the truth. It’s not like they can save him by letting him know that he’s out of options. Perhaps they think it’s better to let him keep clinging to the belief that there is some way out of this, right up until the end.
It’s also possible that Trump’s people are explaining these kinds of realities to him, but he’s blocking it all out because he can’t accept that he’s out of options. In his public appearances he’s coming off not only as senile, but also more delusional than ever. He may be too far gone to even process it when the people around him explain to him that something like a shutdown can’t magically save him.
Trump is a formerly proud and powerful man whose life has now been ripped to pieces in humiliating fashion, and he’s going to spend the tail end of it locked in a cell. There’s nothing left for him. There’s no reason for him to even get out of bed, unless he can pretend to himself that he still has a way out of this. In that sense, perhaps it’s simply a matter of hope springs eternal. Or given how far gone he is, dope springs eternal. But none of it’s going to save him. This kind of delusional hope can only help to hasten his downfall.
