Donald Trump steps on the gas as the wheels come off

| 9:06 am EDT June 30, 2018
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When he began kidnapping thousands of immigrant kids and locking them in cages, Donald Trump was signaling that he had decided to go down fighting. He knew as well as anyone that we were heading into the stretch where Special Counsel Robert Mueller begins dropping bombs on him and everyone around him. So after a year and a half of barking loudly while playing it safe with his actions, Trump finally slammed on the gas, even as the wheels were coming off. Now things are escalating further.

We still don’t know precisely how Trump managed to convince Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to abruptly retire this week, but the connections between Kennedy’s son and Trump’s favorite Russian money laundering bank are, shall we say, interesting. Does this mean that Trump is now planning to use blackmail to oust the people who might be in position to take him down?

Even if Trump can succeed in replacing Kennedy with one of his own corrupt allies, it seems unlikely that he can get a favorable 5-4 ruling in support of pardoning himself or anything similar. So this can’t be the entirety of his plan, can it? Then again, most of Trump’s shots in the Trump-Russia scandal over the past year and a half have been misfires. He took down FBI Director James Comey, which only made the Trump-Russia investigation stronger. Then he took down FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, which gained him literally nothing. Now he’s focused on irrelevant FBI agent Peter Strzok, which will gain him even less.

Donald Trump’s problem is that, even if he does have anything potent up his sleeve, he’s spent far too long cautiously twiddling his thumbs instead of using it. Trump’s proverbial Batmobile has lost a wheel, and he’s careering down Main Street USA, crashing into anything and everything he can. But he still has no idea how to stop Robert Mueller from carving him up.