Donald Trump’s incremental felony confession strategy is already failing him

| 3:45 pm EST December 10, 2018
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When a politician is caught up in a scandal, he’ll usually initially deny the whole thing. Then when one part of the scandal is proven, he’ll try to minimize it by saying “Okay I did that, but at least I didn’t do this worse thing.” Then proof of that surfaces as well, and he keeps incrementally confessing until the whole thing is proven. Sometimes this strategy of dragging it out ends up blunting the impact of the scandal, and causing it to blow over. But this strategy is failing Donald Trump rather badly at the moment.

When evidence surfaced that Trump illegally had Michael Cohen buy the silence of his mistresses during the election, he denied any of it even happened. But now Robert Mueller and his SDNY allies have formally accused Trump of having directed these payoffs, which means they’re sitting on proof that he did. This was just enough to trick Trump into backing himself into a corner, which he promptly did today.

Donald Trump tweeted today that his payoffs were similar to when President Obama was once slightly late in making a legitimate campaign finance filing (nice try), and then insisted that Michael Cohen was the only one who broke the law. The trouble: Trump just publicly confessed to two felonies while trying to minimize their importance. This means that the minute Trump is no longer president, whether by ouster or by losing reelection, he’ll not only be arrested and put on trial for these two felonies, he’ll all but automatically be convicted.

Robert Mueller and the House Democrats now have a powerful tool to use against Donald Trump: he will absolutely go to prison once he’s out of office. Despite the idle fears of some within the Resistance, Trump does not have a magic wand that will somehow allow him to magically remain in office forever; nothing works that way in the real world. As of now, his life is over the minute his presidency is over. The only possibly way out for him is to negotiate his resignation in exchange for some degree of leniency on federal charges, and then take his chances on state charges.

The kicker is that these two campaign finance felonies, while serious and prison-worthy, are probably not among the dozen worse felonies that Donald Trump has committed. He’ll soon be formally accused of everything from espionage, to money laundering, to obstruction of justice, to conspiracy against the United States. He may delusionally think he can beat these charges. But just wait til Mueller explains to him that because he’s already confessed to two felonies, he’s already guaranteed that he’ll spent the rest of his natural life in prison if he doesn’t cut a resignation deal.

The trouble here for Donald Trump is that he’s been baited into using an incremental confession strategy that could only work if this were a straight-up political scandal, and not the criminal scandal that it is. You never confess to crimes in an attempt at getting a political scandal to blow over, because that hands your opponents all the leverage. That’s Politics 101. If Trump weren’t such a newbie at political corruption, he’d have known that. Now it’s too late.