Donald Trump’s end of days

| 9:20 pm EDT May 31, 2018
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What would you do if you were President, and the walls were caving in around you, and you knew deep down that there was no longer any way to prevent your ouster from happening? Maybe you’d decide to take things in a stately direction toward the end, in the hope that history might not end up remembering you all that badly, despite your ouster. But if you’re Donald Trump, it’s a different story. We’re now seeing his answer to the question.

Trump seems to have been knocked for a loop by the one-two punch of Trey Gowdy smashing his last and latest “there was a spy in my campaign” defense, even as Michael Cohen admitted in court that he’s been recording his (presumably incriminating) conversations with Trump for years. So yeah, Trump is still firing off a few obligatory distractions, because really, at this point, it can’t hurt him any further to debase the White House by bringing in Kim Kardashian for an Oval Office meeting. But it’s his other actions today that give away his mindset.

Donald Trump just pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, one of President Obama’s most vicious and demented detractors. On the surface, this pardon looks like little more than a middle finger toward Obama. But Trump is also talking about pardoning his former Apprentice partner Martha Stewart, with whom he had a falling out a long time ago, and former Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich, whom he couldn’t care less about. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with the crimes they’ve committed.

D’Souza was convicted for campaign finance violations. Donald Trump’s hush money payoffs have him facing possible charges for campaign finance violations. Martha Stewart was convicted for personal financial crimes. Trump is going to face a whole host of financial crimes. Blagojevich was convicted for financial corruption while in office. Trump is going to be charged with the same. These pardons don’t lay any sort of legal precedent for Trump getting off the hook. But they do serve to allow Trump to tell himself that such things aren’t really crimes. Deep down, he knows he’s going down. This is all about rewriting history in his head, so he can pretend he’s being unfairly persecuted when they close the prison cell door on him.