Donald Trump checks out
Donald Trump’s election lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood have spent this evening using social media to rather viciously attack Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, accusing them of being part of some kind of ill-defined conspiracy against Trump.
Presumably, this is because Meadows dared to tell Trump that Powell’s lunatic plans to magically overturn the election were literally impossible, and that Pompeo dared to publicly admit that it was Russia who hacked U.S. government agencies. But the specific reasoning behind the scuffle is less important than the fact that it’s happening at all, and what it tells us about Donald Trump himself.
Powell, Wood, Meadows, and Pompeo are all fully complicit in Trump’s overall corrupt agenda. They’re all his henchmen. If Trump were still in the game, he’d be giving them marching orders, telling them what to do, and getting them all on the same page – his page. Instead, Trump’s henchmen are all eating each other alive, even as Trump says and does little. This is a clear sign that he’s checked out mentally, and his henchmen are each left to their own devices and trying to fill the resulting power vacuum with their own personal agendas.
Best anyone can tell, Trump likes to hear from his lunatic lawyers because their magical imaginary solutions make him feel good – but then he also likes it when his more stable henchmen explain why none of it’s real, because that gives him an excuse not to have to take action.
Donald Trump is in that place where he’s scared of his own shadow, knows he’s one false move from finished, also knows that he’s doomed if he doesn’t do anything, and just wants to be told that it’s all going to be magically okay. In other words, he’s checked out entirely.
The danger isn’t that Trump is going to do anything; he’s clearly reduced to trying to create the false appearance of a strongman, to compensate for how powerless he’s become. The real danger is that we have a do-nothing self-pitying defeated blob for a President, at a time when we’re facing a cyber terrorist attack, a worsening pandemic, and a wrecked economy.
