Donald Trump finally sees the writing on the wall
Donald Trump has now been ranting and raving on Twitter, in increasingly hyperbolic and frantic and dishonest fashion, for the past thirteen hours and counting. This is abnormal, even for him. Palmer Report has explained that this appears to be in anticipation of the first sentencing tomorrow in the Trump-Russia scandal, which has the potential to become very ugly for Trump himself. In the larger picture, it’s time to talk about what this really means, and what we can expect from Trump next.
Trump is either desperate today to create a distraction, or to take control of the narrative about his presidency, or to simply take out his frustrations. While we don’t know precisely what’s going on in his head, it is clear that he’s seeing the writing on the wall. Thus far today Trump has attacked everyone from his own Department of Justice, to Congress, to Democrats, to Mexico, to President Obama, to CNN, to NBC, to Amazon, to the FBI, to Honduras. We’d bet real money that Trump can’t even find Honduras on a map, yet he’s so bonkers today, he’s aiming his tweets at new targets.
It’s not as if tomorrow’s sentencing of Alex Van Der Zwaan is going to cause a trap door to magically open up under Trump’s presidency. Not at all. But tomorrow is the first time that someone in the Trump-Russia criminal scandal will be sentenced for having participated in the scandal. Oddly enough, Robert Mueller seems fine with Alex Van Der Zwaan being sentenced to no prison time – but that’s because he only played a minor role, and he cooperated in the end. This is a reminder that at some point Trump’s former close allies Michael Flynn and Rick Gates, who have also cut plea deals, will be sentenced before much longer. And that’s just the start.
We’re now entering the stage of the Trump-Russia scandal where judges begin announcing which participants are going to prison. Donald Trump has to know that this will now continue, with bigger fish involved each time, until it lands on his or his family’s doorstep. He’s spent the past year insisting that the scandal was a witch hunt and a hoax. Now he’s being forced to see that it’s neither. The people around him are going to prison because they participated in a scandal that he’s always been at the center of. That places him in line for prison eventually as well, and even he seems to finally grasp that today.
