Occam's Razor

One thing is pretty clear to me as a result of the 2018 midterms: the decline and fall of Donald J. Trump has started in earnest. Most likely it will quickly pick up speed.

The phases are a lot like dying, except Trump is unlikely to ever reach the final stage: acceptance. If he’s still around on January 20, 2020 when a Democrat is inaugurated president, it will probably be up to the Secret Service to bodily remove him from the White House. I doubt he will show up for the inauguration of his successor, breaking with a long precedent. After all, he couldn’t be bothered to show up for two Veterans Day ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. I don’t think there’s a back door on the White House, but I think there is an underground walkway to the Executive Office Building. That’s probably how he will sneak out of Dodge.

We’ve hit peak Trump, at least as far as Trump’s political power goes. Granted he can still wreak a lot of damage and do other crazy things like getting us into a new war. But he’s reached the point where any action is ultimately self-defeating and only his base believes he is truly working in the national interest. If Trump’s past is any guide to his future, he may cash in his chips and resign, particularly if Mueller’s report ever gets released. The only part of being president that he likes is the attention it gives him, and lately it’s been a lot of negative attention. No fun in that!

Trump is such a child that this latest phase was entirely predictable. He tried to spin his midterm losses as a great victory at first. A few days later it finally dawned on him that he was, well, largely trumped. Then of course he started pointing fingers because of course he couldn’t possibly be to blame. The most recent one was that these defeats were because he was not on the ballot. How strange! One of the few joys he gets from the presidency is holding rallies. He went all over the country to stir up his base and repeatedly told them they had to show up. And they did, but there’s just a lot less to Trump’s base than there used to be and they did not show up in the numbers that Democrats showed up. He held three rallies in Montana trying to defeat Democrat Jon Tester and failed.

The nation has been onto the disaster that is Donald J. Trump for a long time. Trump still hasn’t figured it out; at least it’s not something he can admit to himself. But emotionally he knows he’s been whipped. You can see it in his poutiness and isolation, but also by his reflexively defensive positions. He knows he can’t keep House Democrats from investigating him next year. He’s tried putting in a lackey, Matt Whitaker, as Acting Attorney General to blunt the Mueller probe, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. Before November 6^th, he had Congressional Republican majorities to protect him. Starting in 2019, House Democrats are going to strip him metaphorically naked. We’ll see his tax returns. We’ll learn how much the Trump Campaign was in bed with the Russians. For the next two years, his life will only continue to get more hellish. This is why I think there’s a significant probability he will simply resign at some point.

Even Fox News isn’t reliably parroting his talking points anymore. Actually it’s been Fox News that has set most of his talking points. That is principally Trump’s source of news and opinions, but Fox News’ listeners are predominantly rapidly aging senior citizens. With all the younger people of color coming into Congress, it’s pretty clear that changing demographics are finally reaching critical mass. What eventually emerges won’t necessarily be blue states from sea to shining sea; most likely there will always be plenty of red states in between. Before 2020 though it may finally dawn on Republicans that Trump is a dead man walking and it’s in their best interest to cut him loose. They probably won’t summon the nerve to find a primary challenger to Trump, but they should field someone. As he continues to dissemble, it will be easier for some Republicans to summon some courage in the hopes of beating the long odds. Suddenly, Jeb Bush may not look so bad anymore.

Trump was never great at picking people to work for him. Mostly they are incompetent but sometimes he picks someone actively malicious and effective. Most quickly flame out. His White House is chaotic with no one really in charge. The most recent prominent example was picking Matt Whitaker as acting Attorney General. It’s unclear whether his legal staff first looked into this. I doubt they did because any competent attorney would have warned him picking Whitaker was probably against the law. Most likely Trump just decided impulsively to pick him and left it to staff to deal with the wreckage. This just goes to show his utter incompetence.

Trump certainly excels at keeping the focus on feeding his own ego, and the media is likely to keep dancing to his tweets in the hope of continued advertising revenue. While the general rule is that even negative attention is better than no attention at all, Trump will discover that when attention only generates bad press that it can cut him, make him bleed and perhaps fatally wound him too. Stay tuned.