Trump is in trouble. He knows it. He apparently really misses being done president and paying for his own golf. Right now he is playing coy and saying he will run if his health holds out but the GOP wants to move on from him. They want Trump in Palm Beach hosting fund raisers and playing the hunger games with candidates for his endorsement. But the whole house of cards falls for trump if he's indicted and all of his books become the fertile playground for money laundering charges. They will. That leaves trump with two new, but really not new problems: he can't beat Joe Biden and even if he did, he can't pardon himself. The solution is to get out there everyday and make Trump's indictment look like a political hatchet job to prevent his election. Trump does this reflexively anyway but he has to make it look like his crimes were nothing more than anyone else did so that targeting him was unfair. He won't defend the crimes, he will attack the prosecutors as liberals or rinos. That gets traction with MAGAts.

It's precisely these MAGAts that are confounding the current GOP. They cannot excite or rely upon these people but these people love Trump and will take his directions. The GOP does not have anyone that can replace Trump or even compete with him for popularity and star power and that means trump still owns the party. But what good is owning a party if you're heading to prison?

The solution has to be that trump declines to run for president at a very moment, appoints an heir apparent for the MAGAts to support and that candidate ensures their loyalty and votes by promising to pardon trump for the political witch hunts he's suffered. Everyone gets what they want. The GOP is rid of an aging and completely loose cannon, his historic support is grafted onto the next iteration and Trump gets to sunset out at Maralago instead of federal prison. This is just my suspicion but in writing this I feel even stronger about it.

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.