A lot of my friends these days are discussing exactly how Trump is going to take the big fall. It's pretty obvious that he is. You can't have these many scandals bubbling, associates flipping, tapes surfacing, documents being subpoenaed, past statements unraveling, etc., without a big crash coming. Some combination of these Bad News for Trump stories is going to lead him to ruin and I think people are wasting their time trying to predict that scenario for two reasons…
- We are in uncharted territory. We have never before had a president who could misbehave, name-call, get caught repeatedly lying, show that he doesn't understand his own policies and just generally display dishonesty and incompetence and not lose a substantial portion of his supporters. There are precedents from past presidential downfalls (Watergate, especially) which do or will apply but a lot of this is all new.
- For the first year or so if this presidency, we could wake up each morning — especially those of us on the West Coast because the time zone difference gives Trump a three-hour headstart — and wonder, "What stupid, dishonest thing has he said or done today?" We still have that but the climate of investigation now adds a new morning surprise: "What damning thing has leaked or been revealed today?"
Reason 2 is the biggie and it's growing in significance. We keep having news reports that say in effect or literally, "More bad news for President Trump. It was revealed today…" There's all this stuff coming that we can't see coming. I'll betcha that a month from today, we'll be talking about scandals and dirt that are utterly unknown to us right this minute. Some of them are probably known to Robert Mueller but even he's in for startling new information. It's going to be like that for the rest of the Trump Presidency, however long it endures, and even after.
This morning, we have the first excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book. Tomorrow, it'll be Something Else followed by Something Else followed by Something Else and Something Else and a whole lotta Something Elses. New aides will flip. New hush money payments will be revealed. There'll be more women like Stormy Daniels and Karen Whatzhername, and new dossiers about Russia and we'll hear about new meetings which Trump did or did not know about depending on what his lawyers have told him is the best defense.
I don't know precisely what'll come out…and that's my point. We don't know what we don't know. But we know a lot of it's coming.