No one ever accused Nixon of being stupid, though the Watergate burglary was clearly not a smart move. Nixon was smart enough to know when to resign, and he probably knew that resigning with the lie that he was doing it for the good of the country might give Ford more wiggle room to undermine justice with a pardon.
Of course, Nixon had not been caught in myriad other high and low crimes, so he did not need the Office of the President to guard him against a wave of indictments. Trump has clearly been using this Office to do just that.
With both Manafort and Cohen flipped, and the Dems ready to take over the house leadership, Trump’s days are numbered now in months rather than years. If he were smarter and less compulsively self-destructive--and this is clearly a big “if”--he might consider using the Nixon lie of resigning for the good of the country in order to decrease the amount of ill will directed toward him by those not in his benighted base, those who soon will be standing in judgment of him, and of Pence.
If Trump resigned before the mid-terms, he would have a much more sympathetic Congress in place to receive Pence’s pardon. Given how not a single aspect of the Steele dossier has been proven wrong, how Manafort and Cohen almost certainly have the conspiracy against the U.S. goods for Mueller, and how likely it is that Trump is guilty of something close to treason with regard to Russia, a Pence pardon would certainly not go over well after Mueller’s report comes out.
As is typical with Trump, he will make the unethical, stupid and self-defeating decision to try to ride it out--like some beach-dwelling curmudgeon refusing to evacuate as some global-warming-fueled monster hurricane rolls in.
When asked about the Watergate burglary, Nixon responded that the American “people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” Nixon was wrong about his crook status, but he was right about the American people needing to know whether or not their president is a crook.
We clearly know that Trump is a crook at this point. This is not based on conspiracy-theory fantasies like those that still fuel the “lock her up!” idiocy at Trump’s rallies. Manafort’s flipping should be considered gratuitous evidence of Trump’s status as a crook because we knew he was a crook well before the election.
If Trump had an ounce of honor, he would resign for the good of the country. He might also resign for the good of the GOP so that his party might be able to recover by 20202 from the disgrace of enabling Trump’s illegitimate, disgraceful, "crazytown," and “fear”-ful presidency. But Trump does not have an ounce of honor--moreover, he is too unintelligent and his malignant narcissism is too compulsively self-destructive--and so he will try to use the Office of the Presidency to shield himself from prosecution. He’s going to ride out the storm, and the rest of us will suffer from this.
I hope that it will be impossible for a President Pence to pardon Trump once he has been prosecuted and convicted of his myriad high and low crimes as president, and as many of those crimes from before as possible, because the crimes will be so egregious, and so many, his true mob-boss character will be impossible to deny.
This belated revelation will also show clearly how deeply unpatriotic Trump and Trumpists have been all along at their core.
Since Pence seems to have been deeply in league with Manafort, I wonder if we all will be contemplating what a President Pelosi will do once Trump receives his comeuppance. Alas, I fear that she would go too light on both Trump and Pence as the Democrats have done all along--also guilty of enabling, and an inability to put country above party.
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