With Donald Trump, a few things are certain. He can’t win a national election, and the sooner Republicans make peace with that remorseless fact, the better. Plus, as I pointed out yesterday in addressing Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to handle Trump investigations, new investigations are apt to emerge and further cement his nonviability. Why? Well, for starters, he is naturally reckless. He has also lost a step — his decline is not as patent as that of his presidential successor, but it’s evident. Plus, he is no longer the beneficiary of daily, diligent support from John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway, Don McGahn, H. R. McMaster, John Bolton, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Pat Cipollone, and the rest of an accomplished administration team whose members wore themselves out pushing against his self-destructive proclivities. Now, the proclivities run amok, with Trump sinking under their weight.
You want to tell yourself this is not his fault — at least, not completely? I’m sympathetic. The former president has done a great deal of damage to himself, to the Republican Party, and to the conservative movement’s capacity to stop, much less roll back, what Democrats are doing to the nation’s security and prosperity (although Trump’s elevation of constitutionalist conservatives to the federal bench remains a bulwark to be celebrated). But he has also been subjected to more investigative scrutiny — much of it politicized, though much he brought on himself — than any president or political Svengali in American history. Where he may have violated the law, I don’t blame his enemies for demanding an accounting. After all, we want a reckoning, too, for the political exploitation of the U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus from the 2016 campaign through the Biden years. No one, however, is going to be sent to prison over the latter, and I’d rather Trump didn’t end up there, either.
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