Donald Trump is a frog boiling in water

| 11:45 am EST December 11, 2017
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

They say you can put a frog in a pot of water, slowly boil that water, and the change will come on so gradually that the frog will end up boiling because it never does get spooked enough to jump out. I don’t know if that’s literally true about frogs or not, but I do know that it’s figuratively true about certain humans. Donald Trump is precisely that frog, sitting there and boiling in that water, as we speak. I can prove it.

There was a fear that if Robert Mueller ever arrested anyone important in the Trump-Russia scandal, Trump would panic and respond either by trying to pardon that person, or by trying to fire Mueller. Yet when his campaign chairman and longtime financial associate Paul Manafort was arrested, Trump simply rationalized that Manafort wasn’t that important to him after all. So long as Trump himself got to survive, Manafort was expendable. So he continued to sit there in the hot water, as the temperature went up a few more degrees.

Then Mueller cut a plea deal with Michael Flynn whose sole purpose is to take down Trump and certain members of his family. Again, Trump has done nothing. He’s rationalized that maybe Flynn doesn’t have the goods on him after all. When Mueller arrests or flips Jared Kushner next, we know by now what Trump’s response will be: he’ll rationalize that his own son-in-law isn’t that important to him, so long as he himself gets to survive. Kushner, he’ll decide, is expendable. Then he’ll do the same when the target is his own son, Donald Trump Jr.

This gets dicier as the water temperature continues to rise. In the past, when the water was much less dangerous, we’ve seen Donald Trump flinch and fire people like James Comey. But that only served to backfire and crank up the temperature a whole lot more, and Trump’s response to the pushback was to sit tight. He’s not jumping out of that boiling water now. Each time it gets another degree hotter, he tells himself it’s best to sit tight, and just maybe it won’t get any hotter. Then again, at this point, it’s too late for him to jump out without harming himself in the process. His window for escape has closed. Now he’s just convincing himself that he’s not actually cooked.