Trump: What’s Next?

Donald Trump speaks to supporters

It’s clear that Trump has lost the 2020 presidential election, to the joy of essentially every human being on Earth, minus his remaining supporters here in America.  People around the world are celebrating that the United States has rejected its would-by dictator and restored some level of dignity and decency to the presidency.

Of course, the Trump campaign hasn’t yet run out of ways to pretend that the election is still under contest, but eventually each of these avenues will be closed.  What happens then?  Some things to consider when making predictions:

Trump still has a huge fan base that can easily be incited to violence.  Certainly his baseless claims that the election was rigged, that we’re hearing now, are a step in that direction.  I know people personally who are already talking about discharging firearms if Trump loses.

If Trump pardons his family and himself of the entire collection of federal crimes, confounding both the U.S. Constitution and all sense of morality, he’s still going to be charged on felony counts by the New York State Attorney General.  That office will choose one or two of the crimes that are easiest to prove, and I’m not in a position to which one(s) best fit that description, though I’d guess tax fraud, money laundering, and/or campaign finance fraud.

Trump has some as-yet-to-be-understood relationship with Russian oligarchs that could come into this somehow.

Another ill-defined association involves Deutsche Bank, the only institution on Earth that would lend money to Trump for a great while.  The guy who managed that relationship recently committed suicide, and the son of retired Supreme Court justice Kennedy spent more than a decade there, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer.

Trump has already told his supporters that he’ll leave the country if he loses; it looks quite likely that this is exactly what he’s going to do.  Russia could work, as could Saudi Arabia; it just needs to a Trump-friendly country with no extradition treaty with the U.S.