While this latest Times piece confirms virtually everything any clear-headed adult suspected of a carnival act like Trump for the past 30 years, it will likely mean nothing to MAGA nation, assuming they even hear a word about it in their thickly-insulated echo chamber. But the moderator of next Tuesday’s first debate, Chris Wallace of FoxNews, will commit journalistic malpractice if he doesn’t push Trump on what is in the Times story.

...all the noise Trump (and Bill Barr) have been making about the “rigged” election and “getting rid of the ballots” and the “continuation” is a tactical device to build leverage for a “deal” with Biden once Trump is defeated. (I’ve written about this before, because I think it is palpable likelihood. Like a layer of flop sweat forming under a bad con man’s comb over.)

As today’s Times story lays out, Trump is in (ridiculously) deep debt, with huge bills coming due in the next couple years, for which he is personally on the hook. And the tab gets bigger if he loses his much-referenced tax audit (over $100 million including penalties), and bigger still if New York and god knows how many stiffed contractors, harassed women, former employees go after him … hard … post the immunity of the White House.

Trump desperately … and I do mean desperately … needs a way out of this looming apocalypse. One way is if he wins the election. But barring that he needs something like blanket immunity from the state of New York. And that would mean striking … a deal.

As I’ve said before, only a hopeless idiot would enter into any deal with Trump that didn’t have airtight conditions and abusive-level penalties.

So this is my proposal:

Trump agrees to concede the election. In return, the Biden administration, in union with Andrew Cuomo and Vance in New York set the following conditions for Trump — and his family, (since Ivanka and the boys appear to have fat chunks of fraud splatter in their laps as well) — to avoid prosecution.

The deal requires Trump to submit to a public interrogation by tax and white collar fraud attorney/prosecutors into any and all of his business dealings, from the time he took over from his father through to today. This would include everything involving the Russians, the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and any other thug-ocracy he’s been trolling for loose change.

It also stipulates “the deal” is voided the second Trump lies, “misstates” or “mischaracterizes” any pertinent fact.

Why “public”?

Because the story of Trump and the foundational lies of Trumpism has to be told. It has to be admitted to and confessed by Trump himself. History has to be written by the winners … from the mouth of the loser.

Gellman’s post-election hellscape is based on the premise that “we will never know”. That the fog and stench of Trumpism and Federalist Society Bill Barr-ism is desaigned to prevent anything from ever being truly knowable. (Such is Putin’s game in Russia.)

I believe Adam Schiff for one will eloquently argue that accepting anything less than a full peeling of the Trump myth simply enables a smarter, less louche and preposterous Trump from picking up the pieces and starting all over again. Even the most oblivious and deficient Trumper has to be presented with stark evidence that they’ve been conned … again.

Thirty nine percent will ignore the Times’ tax blockbuster and/or dismiss it as “fake news”, and Biden still needs a solid victory in Florida election night and a landslide overall to neuter any plausible claim Trump and Barr might present.

But the basis is now visibly forming to squeeze Trump into a corner from which his only escape is a Walk of Shame, to reference the entirely apt “Game of Thrones.”

Forget raining, it’s pouring Trump scandal books. The past few days I’ve been toggling between Jeffrey Toobin’s, “True Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Brian Stelter’s, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”

There are separate discussions to be had about both, as there are over Bob Woodward’s “Rage”, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s, “Donald Trump v. The United States” and top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman’s “Where the Law Ends.”

But one stark takeaway from Toobin and Stelter is how completely unprepared “the establishment” was for Donald Trump. More to the point both are argue, is how unprepared traditional legal bureaucracies and journalism organizations still are even today, nearly four years and 20,000 lies after Trump was elected … the first time.

The Eisenhower-era of journalism, courts and politics is long gone. And we’re at a point, right now today where tradition-groomed and bound judges, politicians and journalists are have to ask themselves if they’re really going to play this moment as Robert Mueller did? Are they going to continue to respect the “norms” of their professions, all of which have been mocked, abused and degraded by Donald Trump, in the anachronistic hope that eventually, at some point, if not now, November or a decade from now, normal respect for tradition will prevail again?

Even before we got to the “losers” and “suckers” phase of The Donald Trump Experience we already knew this election was set in cement. Nothing is going to stop 39% of the American voting age population from idolizing a narcissistic reality TV performer. That 39% can almost be described as “genetic”, certainly figuratively and quite possibly literally.

To be specific, about the likelihood that the 39% is an evolutionary standard, possibly millions of years old. There have been studies of the psychological manifestations of an overactive, which is say, “differently wired” amygdala, the brain’s physical center for controlling emotions. A bit more active than “normal” and the fight-or flight mechanism is more hair-trigger and less reflective.

As scientists have said, ruefully in many cases, it’s an open question whether in evolutionary terms this 39% represents the portion of the species that survives what comes next and therefore passes on its DNA, or whether it fades away, an unadaptive anachronism, like wooly mammoths, dodo birds and our prehensile tails.

The immediate problem of course is what damage this highly instinctive, highly reactive, all but completely unreflective allegiance to the biggest ape’s constant false alarms does to the tribe in general.