If you look at his expression and body language during the handover meeting/photo-op with Obama, he knew it, too.
It’s counterintuitive, but losing the election was the plan all along, because it would feed into his “rigged system! lone wolf fighting the machine!” marketing narrative. He neither expected nor wanted to win.
Given his “100% winner” ethos, I’m fascinated by the prospect of what was going on inside his head and how he was rationalizing this contradiction. Probably some form of “by not getting elected, I’m coming out much farther ahead, and will be the real winner,” or some such.
I don’t buy it. Of course he thought he would win. It’s not part of his feeble mind to even imagine losing. Some proof of that is in how he continues to assert he used the bankruptcy laws strategically. He will go to his grave declaring he’s a winner and Biden is fake and all negative newx about 45 is fake.
I think you’re right that he wasn’t planning on winning and it was probably a shock that he never really got over, but I’d take a different view on his motivations.
All through his business career he’s advocated being a disrupter or grenade thrower. His logic is that, if you are the thrower, you are best placed to take advantage of the resulting mayhem [collapsing share price, fire sale, opponents stunned in the headlights etc]. He toyed with presidential runs before but probably was thinking from before nomination how he could leverage that sort of national exposure into power. The idea of Trump running an alternative media network has appealed to him for a while, and I think his plan was to use a failed presidential bid to set it up and use a hated Dem president as his foil. The far right fringe didn’t factor then, and was brought in by the likes of Bannon, but I’m not sure that he thought they’d be such a significant constituency for him. He’s never liked them or felt confident in acting as their leader - he’s always treated them as a rabid dog that’s preoccupied chewing someone else’s leg but they have no money. He needed to tap the big jillionaires who throw money at champions of (reactionary) Republicanism, but they weren’t going to bankroll Trump unless he was going to do something for them.
Either way he has been a diabolical mess. Let us hope we shall never see his kind again. (I give it about 30 days before the pretenders start jockeying for the primaries).
I’m really very curious what the three oldest Trump kids will do. I assume Barron will stay with Melanie. Tiffany will drift off. Ivanka and her creepy looking real doll husband will try to enter politics. But Don, Jr. and Eric? They have no job skills. They don’t have winning personalities.
Whereas I think if he’s assassinated, it’ll be Vlad’s doing, either because Trump is for some reason likely to do something inconvenient to Russia or because killing him off at a key moment will rile up more civil unrest in America.
But he’ll probably just spend his days quietly grifting and delaying the various lawsuits.
Ivanka will go be a Kushner. She’ll be fine, having jumped to a different family of corrupt assholes. But Don Jr and Eric will be stuck trying to hold the collapsing business empire together without success, in part because it’s been held together by Don Sr’s lies the whole time and in part because neither really has a clue about what they’re doing.
I agree. I don’t think he will be assassinated. The Secret Service are good at their jobs. If he loses his SS protection, then that’s a whole other story.
His SS detail will decrease in size dramatically in less than 26 hours, so he’s going to be a bit more vulnerable. We’ve never had a former president assassinated, but then again we’ve never had one like this.
Jr. will be the star of commercials selling the trump brand beard trimmer. Ivanka will die in a botched neck reduction operation. Jared will go into “donald who?” mode. The old man will spend the hours he’s not doing phone interviews scraping the gold plating off his toilets.
I’ve just been reading the Economist article on all the potential legal trouble Trump could face after leaving office. It’s quite a long list, although I suspect most of those won’t happen. They include:
The Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance looking into the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougall as well as potential charges - if Vance finally gets the financial records he’s been waiting for - for “scheming to defraud, falsification of business records, insurance fraud and criminal tax fraud”.
NY AG Letitia James is looking into the potential tax and/or bank fraud charges due to misrepresenting the value of assets. This one could potentially implicate Eric as well.
Civil lawsuits from E. Jean Carroll and Summer Zervos on defamation charges.
DC AG Karl Racine is considering an assortment of emolument violations.
Fulton County, GA DA is likewise considering whether there are charges to be brought with regard to Trump’s phonecall asking for votes to be “found”.
There’s also the potential for charges regarding his role in the Ukraine call (which could constitute extoriton and criminal conspiracy under NY law, in which case we’ll see Rudy on the stand) and his role in the January 6 terrorist attack (criminal charges are unlikely to stick but civil torts from the families of the people who died might).
The article also points out:
Anyway, even if only a few of the above go ahead, Trump will be racking up a lot of legal bills. One hopes his lawyers are smart enough to get payment in advance.
Y’know, that would be a test… will the mainstreamers be willing to leave eyeballs unturned and let Trump just be the province of the wingnut media?
Of course what I expect, because they are that thick, is that they’ll let him go on the wingnut media, but then give me six &*^%# hours in each &^%#@ channel of dozens of talking heads going “look at what terrible thing Trump just said in some other platform!!!”
Christ, I hope not. We’ve had enough of trying to analyze batshit insanity like it has meaning or something.
It’s like if you were at Thanksgiving dinner with your family, and Uncle Frank turns up with his underpants on his head. Instead of having a nice dinner and catch-up with your cousins, the entire conversation is all:
“Why does Uncle Frank have underpants on his head?”
“I’m not sure. They are the blue striped ones. What do you think that means?”
“He’s trying to send us a signal of some sort. Bob, what do you think?”
My favorite guess is, he figured on getting plenty of free publicity and doing well enough that it’d make sense for candidates to fall all over themselves outbidding each other for his endorsement: drop out of the race to play kingmaker and I’ll talk you up in turn, plus here’s a straight cash bribe, and, hey, feel free to praise me in front of cheering crowds by saying you think you’d make a hell of a Secretary of State or whatever in my administration; I won’t contradict you, or whatever.
Just picture it: day after day, week after week, Trump keeps blandly expecting that hoped-for offer, and, well, it just keeps on not coming, is all. Sonofabitch, he thinks to himself throughout the primaries, I make a point of never explicitly offering a quid pro quo, but somebody typically offers me one by now; what the hell is taking these guys so long?
Well, I didn’t actually say TV, just “talk shows.” I was actually thinking more along the lines of talk radio. I believe the John and Ken Show, KFI, in Los Angeles, would love to have him, and he’d probably pull down some decent ratings for them.
Actually, I doubt he would be good for ratings. There were a couple of instances in which he called into a Fox News show and even the sycophants on Fox seemed to get bored by his endless babbling.
