Here’s the crazy part about the Trump tapes

For all his out of bounds behavior and over the top bluster, Donald Trump has always generally been calculated in his actions when it’s come down to it. For instance, whenever his real estate scams have failed, he’s simply bankrupted them and moved on. He’s never been one to stubbornly go down with the ship.

So when Trump definitively lost the election two months ago, in the kind of blowout that made it clear he would have literally zero chance of magically overturning the result, it was reasonable to expect that he would use his transition period to try to help himself. He had a 100% chance of being booted from office, but he had plenty of time and opportunity to try to give himself a softer landing when it came to prison and bankruptcy.

For instance Trump could have used the transition period to try to make himself more popular, even if artificially so, in the hope that prosecutors would be less likely to indict him once he’s out of office. Or Trump could have strategically taken various aspects of government hostage, in the hope he could give them back in exchange for some degree of criminal immunity. Such strategies could have only helped Trump slightly, but they were his only shot at improving his position at all.

Instead Trump has spent the transition period delusionally shooting for the moon, pursuing magic wand solutions that any rational person would have understood weren’t going to work. In other words, Trump has completely wasted his transition opportunity. He could have tried to help himself, effectively declaring bankruptcy on politics. Instead he’s spent these two months doing things that will ensure he ends up with the worst outcome possible.

Imagine realizing that you’re two months away from being vulnerable for indictment and arrest for your crimes, and deciding that the best approach is to call up an enemy like Raffensperger and ask him to commit a felony for you. How could Trump not realize it had zero chance of working? How could Trump not realize that Raffensperger was going to record the call and leak it to the media?

This is some of the dumbest behavior we’ve ever seen out of a villain on the national stage. Now that Donald Trump has realized his life is going to have a bad ending, he’s seemingly decided to try to make sure he has the worst ending possible. Trump was already a lock for prison in New York State; now he’ll surely be tried on a federal level as well. He was already going to lose most of what he had. Now he’ll lose everything.