The decline and fall of former President Donald Trump has begun. This is what to expect to unfold in the next week and months.
Trump will be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for a $130,000 hush money payment to porn film actress Stormy Daniels to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The hush money was fraudulently represented in business records as legal fees to conceal an illegal campaign contribution—making the crime a felony subject to a minimum prison sentence of one year.
Trump’s cri de coeur, echoed by spineless, brainless poodle House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, summoning his unschooled mob to protest the indictment and arrest will be overwhelmingly ignored. Bullies are cowards, and Trump’s remaining bullies do not wish to risk the fate of the January 6th insurrectionists, including more than 1,000 arrests and more than 500 criminal convictions and sentences. The tiny turnout will expose Trump’s plummeting political weakness, and embolden his opportunistic lapdogs to jump ship—including his wife Melania. (She probably has already retained separate counsel). They might recall that President Richard Nixon’s hold-out defenders over Watergate were swamped at the polls in the November 1974 elections.
The anemic public protests over Trump’s Manhattan grand jury indictment will encourage follow-on indictments from the Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor, Fani Willis, for election fraud, e.g., browbeating Raffensperger to find an additional 11,700 votes for Trump and conspiring to manufacture fake presidential electors; and, from federal prosecutors for obstruction of justice and obliteration of presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago, for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and for inciting insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power in violation of the 12th Amendment and Electoral Count Act by force, violence, and intimidation.
All of Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers will be unlearned dregs, like fielding a team with batting averages of less than 100 against Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ty Cobb. Their clumsy ineptitude will spike Trump’s legal vulnerabilities.
Trump will freak out over his indictments. His violent, vulgar, uncouth craziness will be taken to a new level. He will call for violence against his detractors and bewail his fate like King Lear on the heath sans the felicity of expression. But none of his ignorant, hormonal cult will respond fearing prison sentences.
Mr. Trump will plead guilty or be convicted of all charges bringing his short-lived political career to an end. His last days will be like Napoleon’s on the island of Saint Helena with nothing to show for his life but ruination of everything he touched.
There is no happy ending for the United States. It will remain leaderless like an acephalous church with politicians who would have defected to King George III during the American Revolution and would have been excluded from the constitutional convention in 1787 for illiteracy.