{"id":1278,"date":"2020-11-23T17:14:56","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T17:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/?p=1278"},"modified":"2020-11-23T17:14:56","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T17:14:56","slug":"what-donald-trump-will-do-once-he-loses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/2020\/11\/23\/what-donald-trump-will-do-once-he-loses\/","title":{"rendered":"What Donald Trump Will Do Once He Loses"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Donald Trump will do once he loses:<\/span><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bill Palmer<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a012:14 am EST November 6, 2020<\/p>\n

Palmer Report<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0Analysis<\/a><\/p>\n

I hate to spoil it for you, but Donald Trump is going to lose this election. The math makes abundantly clear that Joe Biden will win Pennsylvania, and that alone will put him past 270. It\u2019s over. Joe Biden is going to win this election. Give it a few hours and he\u2019ll be named the winner. So what next?<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

That\u2019ll be up to Donald Trump. He spent the past two days meekly hiding from the public, and then once he realized he was out of time, he meekly whined in front of the cameras. Two major TV networks didn\u2019t even bother to air his entire press conference, to give you an idea of how little of an impact Trump\u2019s weak antics are having.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The question is what Trump will do once the major media outlets actually call the race for Joe Biden. Will we see the nearly depleted Trump who spent most of the vote counting cycle in hiding and is clearly ready to give up on everything, or will we see the panicky and confused Trump who emerged near the end?<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Put another way: now that Trump is going to lose the election, he\u2019s earmarked for prison. New York already has a widely documented grand jury in the process of criminally indicting him for financial crimes. We don\u2019t know when that indictment will come down, but we know that it will. Trump knows it as well. Everything he does next will be in direct response to the fact that he\u2019s earmarked for prison.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

You can safely ignore the part where Trump tries to magically overturn the election through recounts that won\u2019t work, or court filings that are already failing, or an attempt at taking over the Pennsylvania legislature that\u2019s so unrealistic it\u2019s almost hallucinatory in nature.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Once those fantasies subside, Trump will be left with the fact that he has three months left in office before he becomes susceptible to arrest \u2013 and the only leverage he\u2019ll have is that he\u2019s still temporarily the President of the United States.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Trump is a businessman and a dealmaker, albeit an absolutely inept one. He\u2019ll try to figure out how to leverage what\u2019s left of his presidency in exchange for some kind of reduced criminal exposure. The question is whether he\u2019ll start behaving nicely in the hope of convincing prosecutors not to come after him once he\u2019s out, or whether he\u2019ll start making empty threats about blowing everything up in the hope prosecutors will panic and give him immunity in exchange for resigning early.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Either way, it\u2019ll all be an act. Donald Trump is fading badly in the cognitive department, and he now appears to actually believe the phony conspiracy theories that he used to merely use as a weapon for winning the votes of nutjobs. But there\u2019s no indication that Trump wants to go down in some kind of blaze. He might decide to try to make us\u00a0think<\/em>\u00a0he wants to go down in a blaze, but as with most things Trump blatantly threatens to do, it\u2019ll be a bluff.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some have asked if Trump will flee the country. If he does, it\u2019ll be a perfectly humiliating end for him; he\u2019d be a punchline for all time. It\u2019s also likely that if Trump flees, he\u2019ll end up in some kind of Assange-type situation, living in a basement somewhere. We can\u2019t see Trump wanting to take this route. We suspect he\u2019d rather just sit in Mar-a-Lago while he tries to fend off his criminal charges, and hope he convinces the judge to give him bail while he drags out the start of his trial for a couple years.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a hypothetical scenario in which Trump resigns early so Mike Pence can pardon him and his family. The theory is that Trump\u2019s pardon would be more likely to hold up in court if it comes from Pence, than if Trump pardons himself. But this wouldn\u2019t do anything to shield Trump or his family from state charges, so it would be a partial solution at best.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The bottom line is that Donald Trump has no good options from here, and he\u2019ll merely be focused on trying to keep himself out of prison. The nightmarish part is that, even with Donald Trump merely using these next three months to try to engineer a relatively soft landing for himself, hundreds of thousands more Americans will needlessly die in the ongoing pandemic.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

One other factor to consider is that with control of the Senate about to come down to a pair of runoff races in Georgia in January, Mitch McConnell will now have to put on a good show in order to make the case to Georgia voters \u2013 who just voted for Joe Biden \u2013 that they should vote for the two Republican Senate candidates. McConnell\u2019s best option could be to start pushing things like a stimulus package while pressuring Trump to stay out of it.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0There are a lot of moving parts. But we\u2019d guess that the final three lame duck months of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency will look a lot like the first forty-five lame duck months of his presidency: him trying to take care of his own interests and not doing much else.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What Donald Trump will do once he loses:   Bill Palmer\u00a0|\u00a012:14 am EST November 6, 2020 Palmer Report\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0Analysis I hate to spoil it for you, but Donald Trump is going to lose this election. The math makes abundantly clear that Joe Biden will win Pennsylvania, and that alone will put him past 270. It\u2019s over.… (1 comment)<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-larrynorton","post-1278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","no-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8bppg-kC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1279,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278\/revisions\/1279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}