Crippled Donald Trump is trying to scare us with talk of a military coup he knows he can’t pull off

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One of the most consistent aspects of Donald Trump’s behavior: when he leaks that he’s going to do something dastardly, it means he knows he doesn’t have the muscle to do it, and he’s merely trying to create the appearance of strength. Accordingly, when Trump is actually going to do something dastardly, he doesn’t threaten to do it first; he just does it.

The New York Times is now reporting that during a meeting last night, Donald Trump asked his handlers about the possibility of using the U.S. military to somehow magically keep himself in office. This means that Trump knows he doesn’t have the muscle to pull off something like that, and he leaked it because he wants us all cowering to him. If Trump were going to do something like this, according to his own pattern of behavior, he’d be doing it instead of threatening to do it.

That said, even the fact that Donald Trump is talking about such an impossible scenario is grounds for his immediate removal from office. Mike Pence is the only person in the U.S. government who can initiate the 25th Amendment, and we must place as much political pressure on Pence as possible to get him to do it.

We must also not cower to Donald Trump. We’ve already defeated him. He’s now crippled and he knows it. His future consists of bankruptcy and prison, and he knows that too. If we cower to his impossible threats, it’ll hand him leverage for negotiating some kind of immunity deal on his way out of office. One of the most important things we can do right now is to make sure Trump knows that we know he can’t magically pull off a military coup. This takes away whatever leverage he’s trying to carve out right now with his threats to do impossible things to us.

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