Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Trump's Impending Collapse

 That oily motherfucker has slithered out of so many traps that it's tempting to think that he was never have a reckoning. 

The caveat is that the perception that he is never held accountable isn't exactly true. Yes, like millions of Americans, I want his bloated, diapered ass behind bars, and that is unlikely to happen soon enough. However, there have been "accountability moments" for Trump: numerous court defeats for his policies, especially on immigration; the 2018 midterms; the 2020 election; the Trump University and Trump Foundation fraud decisions and now the E. Jean Carroll and NY fraud cases.

The latter two are important because they hit Trump's ego at its most vulnerable spot. Trump isn't "rich" in the way we would typically understand it. Trump is leverage to high hell to support a celebrity lifestyle. Trump isn't a "builder", he's a brand manager whose brand is "Donald Trump, NY Tycoon and Celebrity."

The impending margin call on that lifestyle on Monday is huge. It is not our preferred outcome of Trump being frogmarched into Danbury penitentiary in an orange jumpsuit, but it hits him where he lives. Literally. Trump pulled in all his markers to pay the Carroll bond. Now he faces a bond five times as large, and no one will loan money to a guy guilty of lying about his properties to secure loans. He's also leverage everything he owns. That's so critically important. Trump HAS to appear rich. The fragility of that position is what has him scrambling.

We have simply conceded that Trump has some sort of secret sauce for "winning, so much winning" because he managed to squeak out that catastrophic win in 2016, but he's been losing ever since, and hopefully Monday will see him lose bigly yet again.

No comments: