Trump Is Leaving - But He's Not Going Away.

§1 - Trump is leaving, and part of him knows that.

It's been almost three weeks since the election and Trump is still tweeting that he won.

I don't think, in his cold, dead, money-grubbing, narcistic heart, that he really believes this. His lawsuits and challenges are evaporating. He might still be thinking about some crazy plan he and his henchmen [paging Bill Bar & Stephen Miller, et.al.] have thought up to somehow prevent some Secretaries of State from certifying their results in an attempt to convince some legislatures to appoint alternate slates of electors and/or get it into the Supreme Court. I don't really think that's going to go anywhere, either, especially when you consider that multiple states' election results would have to be flipped.

Some people are kicking around the idea that Trump may somehow try to use the military to stay in power. I think this is kind of ridiculous and I'm not going to get into it. If you're interested, Beau of the Fifth Column has that pretty much all wrapped up right here:

And then there's all the talk about Trump having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from the White House. While that would be so very satisfying to watch, I don't think that's going to happen. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen showed up on my TV Machine recently and said it's quite likely that Trump will go to Mar-A-Lago for the holidays and just not come back for Biden's inauguration. This seems extremely plausible. Trump thinks of himself as the greatest winner of all time, so being present for what must certainly be his greatest defeat and humiliation is probably too much for his YUGE ego to handle.

§2 - Trump in prison?

I'm seeing a lot of people on the Interwebs talking about how Trump should go to prison - and if he's tried and convicted of crimes, that's the logical things that should happen. And while, just like him being dragged out of the White house, knowing that he'd be spending the rest of his days behind bars would make a lot of people in the USA, and the rest of the world, incredibly happy, that doesn't mean it's a good idea for a couple of reasons.

• Even though Trump has brought the USA to the brink of being a 3rd-World-Shithole-Banana-Republic, I think it would be a really bad look for us, on the world stage, to put Trump himself in prison for his obvious malfeasances while in office. That does not mean I wouldn't welcome the Trump Administration, in its entirety, being investigated by the DOJ, congressional committees, and possibly even by a special council. In my mind, I think the most important thing is for all his dealings to be exposed so that congress can pass legislation to prevent such fuckery from ever happening again. Since Trump is probably going to be living at Mar-A-Lago, I think it's urgent that laws be passed to prevent any organization from which a sitting or former president derives income to receive taxpayer dollars. Specifically, I don't want the Secret Service to be paying for golf cart rentals and $650/night hotel rooms while they protect His Orange Putrescence and The Deplorable Trump Spawn for the rest of their fetid lives. Additionally, the guard rails of Executive Power and the Rule of Law need to be reestablished.             
   
• It's pretty safe to assume that Trump's pardon machine is working overtime right now. To maintain his self-delusion that the election isn't decided, they may not be signed and dated yet, but I bet they've been printed up already. The only question I have about this is will Trump seriously try to pardon himself, or will be see Air Force Two heading to Florida on January 19th with Mike Pence and Chief Justice Roberts on board. In any event, there will be pardons and their validity will be litigated. I just hope Joe Biden hasn't had "46" embroidered or embossed on too many things, because there's a real possibility that he'll be our 47th president.
  
  
• When it comes to the civil and criminal charges coming out of New York and other jurisdictions, I stand by what I said above about putting Trump in a jumpsuit that matches his orange face being a bad look. He and The Spawn have already paid fines and been forced in to settlements like the one prohibiting them from ever operating a charity again. I would rather see things go in that direction where they're stripped of wealth, prestige, and their ability to operate as the heads of  their various businesses ever again. Being kicked to the curb like that would probably hurt them more personally than doing some time at Camp Cupcake. Bigly. 

That being said, if Trump, The Spawn, or any other member of his administration endangers national security by disclosing classified information, then I won't say a word if they're tried, convicted, and disappeared to life in solitary confinement in Gitmo.   
 
§3 He's Not Going Away

So why is he still pretending that he still going to be president on January 21st, 2021?

Short answer: It's because he's leaving, but he's not going away. 

Remember this picture of Trump and Melania from Inauguration Day 2016?



See how happy they look? 

You'll remember that there was a lot of speculation that Trump didn't mean to win in 2016 - it was all just supposed to be more Reality TV and a YUGE publicity stunt. Ratings for The Apprentice were starting to sag, and Trump was thinking about his next project to stay in the public eye and remain relevant. It wasn't long after Trump secured the GOP nomination, he started saying that the election was going to be rigged against him. This seems to support the idea that Trump meant to lose and use his claims that it was rigged as the foundation to become a political media star spewing conspiracy theories and bashing Hillary Clinton, either on Fox News or possibly even on his own outlet. Now, at least to me, it's starting to look like he's getting ready to revive those plans and I think it's going to go something like this:

Trump is going to continue to bitch and moan about the election being 'stolen' from him in order to keep The Deplorables fired up. The moment that it can no longer be denied that Biden will be inaugurated on January 20th, he's going to announce that he's running again in 2024. This serves a couple of purposes.

1. It sabotages the Biden transition by keeping them locked out. 

It's no secret that it's long been GOP strategy to hobble and obstruct Democratic administrations for their own gain. Remember after the 2010 midterms, when the economy was still in a sluggish recovery, and McConnell was asked what his top priority as incoming Senate Majority Leader was going to be? It wasn't work to speed the recovery along or some other legislative agenda, it was to "Make Obama a one-term president." It's what they do and no one should be surprised. Trump is doing it out of his intrinsic maliciousness, and GOP leadership is letting it go on because Trump is doing their work for them. It doesn't matter to many Republicans that this also creates national security problems. I've heard people on my TV Machine saying that the GW Bush administration's ability to prevent 9/11 was hindered by a delayed and sluggish transition due to Bush v. Gore. Who knows? Trump has been a threat to our national security since he invited the Russians into the Oval Office and showed them classified information to which they should have never had access. If it didn't matter then, or during the impeachment, why would it matter to the GOP now? If Biden doesn't get a quick grip on things and there's more catastrophes than what we're already dealing with, it's just more ammo for the GOP to use in 2022 no matter the all the death and destruction that might be unleashed - collateral damage isn't in their vocabulary.

P.S. Is that the sound of shredders in the White House destroying evidence I hear?

2. He can continue fundraising operations for his campaign along with his Saving America super PAC. 

With a little paperwork and the appearance of running again in 2024, he can continue to raise money. Another thing Michael Cohen said was that once he leave office he's going to get into cash-flow problems - a lot of his properties are allegedly underperforming and I think it's easy to see that his that that's going to happen to his D.C. hotel as long as he's out of office . He won't be able to use Air Force One anymore, so he's going to have to pay for his own travel. It's been said that he's never going to stop holding rallies and that money has to come from somewhere.

3. It maintains Trump's leverage over the GOP.

As long as Trump keeps telling The Deplorables that he's going to run again in 2024, no one up for reelection in 2022 or 2024 will say a word against him out of fear that he'll turn MAGA/CULT45 against them. The longer Trump keeps this going, the more likely it is that no one else will announce for president in 2024. This could turn out working in our favor. If he doesn't drop out, for whatever reason, until late 2023/early 2024, the GOP will be in disarray and have to run a quickie primary, if that's possible, leading into some sort of brokered convention to name a nominee. Let us not forget that Trump is vindictive enough to do just that if Republicans give him any side eye between now and then. There are also rumors that Don Jr. and Kimberly Gargoyle and trying to get some sort of control in the RNC structure, but I don't know how much there is in that.

And then there's this:

There are people on my TV Machine who keep speculating that the reason a majority of GOP leadership aren't coming out and publicly saying that the election is over and Biden won is because they're afraid of being on the receiving end of one of Trump's "mean tweets." Sure, there's going to be some mean tweets coming out of Trump's national security threat of a phone, but the real reason is because they know that TRUMP ISN'T GOING AWAY just like Rep. Jim Banks is quoted as saying in the tweet above. It's not the tweets they're worried about, it's CULT45! 

MAGA is not going to just magically evaporate on January 20th, 2021 - and we're going to have to find a way to deal with them. 

How, I don't know.