Donald Trump is accelerating his endgame

| 1:00 am EDT August 26, 2017
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Donald Trump is losing. He’s historically unpopular. He’s had to part ways with most of the advisers he’s relied on. His own party is turning against him. And it’s a matter of time before the pressure being applied to his co-conspirators motivates one of them to flip on him in the Russia scandal. And so he’s doing what comes logically once people realize they’re about to lose: he’s accelerating his endgame.

We’re now seeing this acceleration in spades. Trump no longer cares what things look like; he’s instead focused on doing as much as he can while he still can. He took a seventeen day vacation to his own golf resort for the primary purpose of being able to bill the Secret Service for rent money, so he could pocket it. Nevermind that the vacation made him look terrible; he was going to get that money while he still could.

Trump is even making a point of running a faux-reelection campaign right now, just so he can milk his remaining supporters for “campaign” donations. He’s already been caught using those 2020 campaign funds for things like paying his son’s legal bills. If he thought he still had a future in office, he’d wait and cash in on his 2020 campaign in a more believable timeframe. But he’s no longer thinking that far ahead. He’s cashing in on an imaginary reelection effort right now, while he still can.

And in the latest sign, Trump pardoned his racist criminal pal Joe Arpaio today, even though that too will hurt him in the credibility department, because there’s no point in putting it off any longer. In fact, Trump seems to be getting the Arpaio pardon out of the way so he can clear the deck for his likely final act: trying to pardon himself and his family and his Russia co-conspirators. There is no clear consensus among legal experts as to whether any of those kinds of pardons would be Constitutional, and the Supreme Court would end up having to decide. But you can smell it coming.

Donald Trump is so far removed from caring about appearances at this point that he headed out on yet another vacation even as a major hurricane was about to make potentially deadly landfall in Texas. When you’re near the end of anything, and you know you’re going to lose, you start trying to figure out what you can still get out of that loss. In Trump’s case, he’s decided to accelerate his endgame – even if doing so ends up accelerating his exit.