Donald Trump has no idea how screwed he is

| 9:21 pm EST December 19, 2017
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It would be one thing if Donald Trump were generically expressing confidence in private that Robert Mueller will end up exonerating him. Some people try to think positive no matter how bad they know it’s getting for them. Some people truly believe they’re going to win no matter how badly they’re losing. But Trump is now revealing himself to be in a very different, and oddly specific, headspace: he in fact has no idea about anything that’s going on, and he’s instead working with a fictional narrative entirely.

Trump is now privately telling his confidantes that Robert Mueller is soon going to write a letter exonerating him in the Russia scandal. We already know that his attorneys have been telling him that Mueller isn’t actually investigating him, and that the entire Trump-Russia probe will be finished soon. So either they’re also telling him about the supposed letter, or he’s made up that particular detail on his own, as part of the larger fantasy he’s being fed. His attorneys’ motivations here are another discussion entirely. The big question here is why Trump actually believes this crap, and what he’s likely to do about it.

On first blush, this sounds like an imminent problem. If Trump believes that Mueller is about to exonerate him and write him a love letter, what will Trump do when that doesn’t happen? Here’s the thing, though: if Trump really is so psychologically fragile that he’s truly this malleable, it means he’ll believe anything that sounds like good news. So if Trump’s attorneys come back to him in a bit and tell him that Mueller is continuing his investigation but it’s somehow good news for Trump, it seems a given that Trump will eagerly swallow that fantasy as well.

Perhaps Donald Trump’s attorneys will tell him that Robert Mueller is secretly investigating Hillary Clinton, and that’s the reason the probe has to continue. If Trump truly is in a place where he’ll believe any supposed good news he’s told, they can just feed him any new line of crap at any given time. In fact it’s more or less what they’ve been doing all year. In such case, Trump has no idea how screwed he is – and that’s good news for those who oppose him.