Pack up the cats

| 9:09 am EDT August 12, 2022
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There is a deeply sarcastic rock band named Local H, who once had an album named “Pack up the cats.” I’m not sure if they came up with that phrase or if it predates them, but in any case, it’s the phrase that comes to mind in the wake of the bombshell reporting that the Feds were looking for classified documents related to nuclear weapons when they searched Donald Trump’s home.

There’s a rule that says whenever you’re trying to figure out a brewing Donald Trump scandal, start by assuming he did the most deranged thing possible, make it twice as bad as that, and you might be getting close to just how deranged of a thing he did. That seems to apply again, as the clear implication from the Washington Post reporting is that Trump stole nuclear secrets on his way out of office and hid him in his basement.

This is, obviously, the sum of all fears when it comes to Donald Trump. You just hope the documents were recovered, and not sold to Saudi Arabia or Kim Jong Un. If the reporting is correct and the DOJ has built its criminal case correctly, Trump will never, ever get out of prison. But it goes much deeper than that.

Some House and Senate Republicans have aligned themselves with Donald Trump, and remained loyal to him, simply because they’ve opportunistically felt that it was what Republican base voters wanted to hear. They’ll drop Trump the minute he becomes a liability. But plenty of other House and Senate Republicans have outright built their entire political identities in tandem with Trump. They don’t have anywhere to go with their messaging but pro-Trump.

That means they’re now in a real pickle – and not just in terms of optics. If this search warrant gets unsealed in the coming days and it confirms the media reporting that the Feds went into Trump’s home to retrieve stolen nuclear secrets, how can Trump’s closest congressional allies find a way to still stand by him? They’ll desperately want to. But we’re talking about a guy who’s in the process of going down for stealing nuclear secrets – and that’s before getting to the question of whether or not he tried to sell them. Trying to stand with him after this will be like trying to stand on, well, nuclear waste.

So pack up the cats. This is the end of Donald Trump. At long last, this is going to be the end of him. But what about the ecosystem of political corruption and filth that’s sprung up around him over the past several years and overtaken about 98% of the Republican Party? That remains to be seen. Another question, given the stunning severity of Trump’s crime spree and the sheer number of congressional Republicans who have been spending significant time at Mar-a-Lago over the past year and a half, is how many of them will end up going down with him.