Presidents who believe that they will be financially ruined and go to jail if they are no longer president do the strangest things:
President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.
Hours before he was scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private call. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do.
Kemp declined the entreaty from Trump, according to the person.
I can’t explain this behavior in any other way. It’s just sheer terror that is motivating Trump now. He doesn’t care how many times he fails, how many people think he’s an idiot, or even whether he’s compounding his legal problems. He’s not going to give up throwing Hail Marys in an effort to remain in power because he is so profoundly conscious of his guilt that he has zero incentive to give up.
I also doubt he gives the slightest shit about his kids, with the possibly exception of Ivanka. He’ll pardon them preemptively, but mostly to protect himself. Except, it won’t really work. They can best protect him by hiding behind their right not to incriminate themselves, but that right disappears if you are immune to prosecution.
The whole family is fucked but prosecutors will still have to find juries that haven’t been infected by Trump-driven right-wing narratives. Jury nullification is the Trumps’ best bet. Their businesses are doomed no matter what they do.
I’m not sure it’s just the prospects of financial ruin & prison. I suspect there’s an existential need to go out in flames. In any case he’s really crossed the point of no return. The question is called: who stands for the American Democracy built, enriched and defended by generations of patriots and who stands for Trump?
Mike Pence
For Trump, he’s screwed as his financial crimes are at the state level and there’s no way his pardon palooza works for that. His kids are likely to be on a flight to Dubai or somewhere boarding at 11am Jan 20. Ivanka would be going to prison if she stayed. They’re all flight risks imo
Yeah. Probably should be confiscating their passports, pronto.
Prison? I’m not convinced. We never seem to hold rich and powerful people to account. From McCarthy to Nixon to Reagan to Bush I and Bush II. A few of Nixon’s henchmen served time. No one has since.
I think it’s simple narcissism. Trump can’t deal with losing. His whole life has been about avoiding that label and that fate. He’s flailing because he has no space to lose. Assuming he doesn’t find a way to overturn the election and what’s left of our democracy, this will break him. I don’t think any amount of bleating, pouting or chest pounding will compensate for a Biden inauguration.
A psychologically health person might grow from an experience like this. Even one with a modicum of inner strength. Trump, however, is too badly damaged. There’s no “there” there. Just a facade. Tear that down and the whole seeming edifice falls into a pile of ruins.
I believe you are right about this. Trump is indeed terrified of financial ruin and prison. And that is amplified by his most serious narcissism in which he simply cannot accept defeat. Would it really surprise anyone if he had a breakdown in the next several weeks? Still his never ending lies will have an impact on all of us in the years ahead. A terrible time awaits us all. Some significant portion of 74 million Trump voters believe the democrats stole this election.
No. In fact, one could argue it’s already taking hold. .
There are a dozen reasons why Trump is causing as much trouble as possible now. Moment to moment, he reacts to the stimuli he experiences. And that also promotes his con-game. We are given so many phony distractions, that so many of us feel some weird duty to explain and understand, while the conman goes on to complete his con. Trump has a congame going, that is also mixed together with his specific suite of emotional disorders.
In the good old days, we had corrupt officials like Agnew. He saw that the system was on the one hand incapable of dealing with his corruption at that time and place. But he also understood that he had only certain cards to play. He and the system made a reasoned deal. Resign, get a light sentence, live comfortably thereafter. End of story.
Trump is different from that. I think it is key to understanding him, to understand that absolutely everything he does is intended by him, either intuitively or rationally, to make him richer and more powerful. But with his set of psych issues, his demons will never be satisfied.
It does not matter what the particular words or actions are, and we don’t need to burn up our energy explaining them. We just need to understand that this is a criminal pulling every string he can find, to become richer and more powerful, and he cannot bring himself to stop. And he has found roughly half of the voters who like the way he is pulling the strings.
Unlike other countries, we don’t have a tradition of authoritarian leaders. And we don’t have a tradition of failed leaders who are executed, exiled, or who commit suicide. No mechanism to end the authoritarian’s rule, when all else has failed. Trump doesn’t have just a cadre around him to protect him, he has, see above, half the voters, and essentially (still) the whole repub party. Trump will keep pulling the strings. Where this ends is anybody’s guess.
The bigger mystery is the 74M people. When I came to US in 1980, I was attracted to its politics of reason, logic, and rationality, as opposed to my native country of birth – India, where at that time it was connections and luck of birth! Kennedy had sent Armstrong and others to the moon, Woodward and Bernstein had brought down the most powerful man through gumshoe journalism, Einstein had chosen to make US his country, as had so many other Nobel laureates (in my own institution Caltech there was Max Delbruck). The Hollywood soft power showed a country of limitless boundaries, welcoming all.
But what was hidden from plain sight, perhaps only to outsiders, was a deep dark core of raw molten racism – like the core of the earth. A magnetic dynamo that made many things click! Nixon and Reagan’s party above country brought some of those caogulates to the surface, but it was truly Gingrich and DeLay that started the csytallization that gives us McConnell and now Trump. How does this end?
Like in wine making, Trump will be the fining agent for this avatar of the Rethuglican party. He will take down the dregs, and over time, a cleaner principled opposition will emerge. It is hard to see this right now, when the vortex has just started swirling. But it will. And it will be a cleaner democracy, ready for bottling and aging!
Regarding the rough half of the electorate who voted repub, it occurs to me that the repubs have had a hard time securing a clear majority vote in presidential elections for a while now. Gone are the days of a Nixon or Reagan, who could secure well more than a few percent majority.
So the repubs turned to other ways of winning. In particular, they obstruct and attempt to invalidate votes. The legal system is a key tool to do this, along with restrictive laws pased by repub state legislatures. Bush/Gore must have really whet their appetites, plus emphasized to them the need to control the courts. Also jimmying the electoral college; this happened I think fortuitously for Trump in 2016, and now he has threats of openly controlling the EC count.
If you can’t win the popular vote, in order to win you must topple the structures that support the primacy of the popular vote. Which is what we are seeing the repubs do.
Candidates like Trump don’t win the popular vote. But their testy and vocal supporters are apparently extremely loyal, and can sow conflict and furor, destroying confidence in government. America’s Mayor, and his flooding of numerous hearings with absolute idiocy, is another example of this. All of which contributes toward stressing the system and, in the repub game plan, breaking it to allow complete control (in their dreams) to tumble into their laps. And so they can get the authoritarian rule they have wanted for so long.
And Trump proved in 2016 that he could snag a few normally democratic states and we returned the favor this year. Gonna be fun in four years especially if the Orange One runs again. Dems gotta keep their eye on the electoral ball.
Yep. He is scared to death. I suspect the thing that scares him the most is in own powerlessness. None of his tricks are working. He can’t even bully a southern governor.
Very soon after Trump was inaugurated I started saying (to the point of tedium) that the end game would be Pardon, Resign, Flee. Pardon himself and family, unless he can get Pence to promise a more indelible pardon in which case you go to resignation first. Then GTFO of the country. (My money is on the Philippines.) The only surprising thing is that he waited around to lose an election. He bought himself a huge load of unnecessary humiliation, and the end game remains the same. He still needs a pardon, he still needs safe harbor with some friendly and not overly expensive thug. He’s really too dumb for a life of crime.