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There is, of course, one remaining possibility that could alter the equation as laid out here: America may be invited to witness the complete, utter, monstrously loud self-disassembly of Donald J. Trump in the public square. Should Trump attempt to effectively suspend the rule of law in America by firing Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and/or Robert Mueller; should he seek to pardon any person believed by half or more of the country to be one of his coconspirators at the time he pardons them; or should he so dissociate from the reality of America as a democracy that his increasingly mercurial Twitter feed and undignified public presence become unsustainably obscene, then a spectacular self-implosion like this could so embarrass his allies and a sizable percentage of his backers that support for his administration craters in a way modern polling has never seen. In that case, America might yet awake from this presidency as from a bad dream. This future becomes increasingly likely with each Trump tweet baselessly calling the Mueller investigation “rigged” or ominously signing off “stay tuned!” after declaring that any investigation of his actions before his presidency or while he is in office is “illegal.” Having represented more than two thousand accused criminals and seeing, in several of the worst of them, many of the same traits evident in this president, I cannot help but anticipate at least one illegal firing and at least one illegal pardon—obstruction in the guise of leniency—before the curtain falls on the Trump era. Any such action would of course be accompanied by a legion of pundits and politically minded attorneys assuring Trump and his supporters that a president can execute any of his constitutional functions for an illegal purpose. But he cannot.
If the Democrats do take the House of Representatives in the fall of 2018, it will happen in part because Trump cannot help himself from committing political and cultural atrocities on a near-daily basis. In that, and in his inability to tell the truth or value any cause or person more than he values himself, he is apparently pathological. He will not, one would expect, ever agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller; he will fight any subpoena issued to him in court, and he will lose if his case reaches the Supreme Court. By the same token, Trump’s allies in Congress may continue to obstruct the investigations into his administration, even mounting a doomed campaign to impeach Rod Rosenstein or terminate the special counsel’s authority. But I predict cooler heads among the Republican leadership—with a longer vision, if not necessarily a more expansive understanding of civic duty—will prevail.
If Rod Rosenstein is still the acting attorney general for the Trump-Russia investigation when Mueller issues his final report sometime in 2019 or 2020, he will release the report to the public over the objections of fellow Republicans in Congress. If they somehow temporarily block him from making the report public, it will leak; it will be longer, more comprehensive, and more damning than any public consideration of Trump’s misdeeds could have anticipated. Mueller’s access to Trump’s financial records, for a start, will have opened for the special counsel an entire landscape of graft Americans can’t now contemplate. Unfortunately, far-right media—in many cases, personalities on the right who simultaneously advise Trump as they analyze his presidency—have done so much to inure a subsection of Trump supporters to a sober, professional, rational analysis of the hard and circumstantial evidence in the Trump-Russia investigation that a notable bloc of voting Americans will reject whatever Mueller writes in his report simply because he was the one to write it.
Whatever happens, America—which has been spiritually, psychologically, and politically paralyzed by Trump’s toxic insinuation into its culture—will continue in a state of paralysis that won’t be broken until Trump’s exit from American life. And when that happens, America is likely to find that the president’s unprincipled and narcissistic reality could not be sustained at home or under the gaze of the entire world. That gaze will reveal, even more than is already evident, that the world Donald J. Trump inhabits isn’t the one most of the rest of us do.
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