We’ve entered the hostage standoff phase of Donald Trump’s downfall

| 7:00 pm EDT September 29, 2019
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I can’t tell you how much longer Donald Trump will remain in the presidency. But I can tell you this: as of this past week, his presidency is over. He’s done. It’s all over, except for the part where he decides how he wants to go down. How do I know this? I’ve seen this script before, enough times to know how it ends – and so have you.

Whether it be in the movies or in real life, we’ve all seen the storyline play out time and again: criminal gets caught. Criminal holes himself up and takes hostages. At that point the criminal has lost, and it’s just a matter of how the criminal ultimately decides he wants to go down. That’s where we are with Donald Trump’s presidency right now.

As of this past week, there’s no longer a Trump presidency. There’s no legislative agenda. There are no trade deals, international negotiations, broad initiatives, or anything at all. To the extent that Donald Trump was ever doing any of those things, that’s all done now. He’s been caught red handed. He’s holding the Oval Office hostage. He knows that if he tries to just walk away, he’ll be immediately arrested (on New York State charges at first, then possibly federal charges later). He’s stuck in a holding pattern, powerless, surrounded.

Donald Trump has a finite amount of time to keep this hostage standoff going. Pro-impeachment poll numbers are now rising by the day. Before much longer, there will be so much overwhelming public pressure for Donald Trump’s ouster, the Republicans in Congress will have to start making difficult calculations about whether they might each have a better chance of saving their own seats in 2020 if they throw Trump overboard. Keep in mind that the GOP very loudly had Nixon’s back in 1974, until suddenly one day the GOP decided to show Nixon the door. Funny how polling data works that way.

As we watch this hostage standoff play out, keep a few things in mind. Donald Trump doesn’t have a magic wand. He’s way, way, way, way, way past the point of being able to pull off starting a war, or some other nonsense, in the name of trying to save himself. He has no remaining moves of any substance to make, and no way of pulling them off. It’s just a matter of how long he wants to drag out the standoff.

Keep in mind that the longer Donald Trump stubbornly drags this out before giving up, the more focus will be placed on investigating his criminal scandals, the more whistleblowers will come forward, the more of Trump’s people will cut cooperation deals, and the more people in Trump’s orbit will go down. Quite a few of the House and Senate Republicans are in Trump’s orbit. How much longer before they shove him out the back door in a last ditch attempt at making it all go away?