100 days, 100 sleepless nights

I wanted to write about Donald J. Trump’s first 100 days as alternative president of the United States, but it seems that everybody else in the country is either writing or talking about it, so I don’t know what else I could say.

Except this:

Shortly after his inauguration, I started a Facebook poll, asking my friends to pitch in $5 and pick the date when they thought Trump would be impeached. The winner gets all of the money, which several players have said they would donate to the ACLU to help pay for the fight against Trump’s authoritarian regime.

I chose the date June 23, for no particular reason other than it just seemed appropriate, so I have a little time left before I have to start worrying that he might actually get through the year. I have twice written in this blog that RussiaGate is not going to end well for the King of Trumps, but I acknowledge that it might take some time before the last domino falls.

After all, it took, what, a little over two years for Woodward and Bernstein to bring down Richard Nixon. Of course, Nixon was a lot smarter than Trump and had a long political career, so you’d expect him to hold out longer than a political novice like Trump.

That said, I have a few thoughts about Trump’s mental acumen as he starts his second 100 days.

It has been well documented that Trump knows very little about how our government works, virtually nothing about international geopolitics and less than nothing about American history, and over the course of the past two years he has said some of the stupidest things that ever fell out of a president’s mouth.

But whenever I start thinking that Trump is nothing more than a wealthy idiot, one thing keeps sticking in my mind. It occurs to me that while he’s not very good at telling the truth in present tense, he’s pretty good at covering the tracks he thinks he might leave in the future.

For example:

* When he wasn’t sure he would get the Republican nomination because of a brokered convention, he tossed the blame over to the GOP establishment, saying they were defrauding their own voters. “I think you'd have riots” if the GOP nominated someone else, Trump said on CNN. “I'm representing a tremendous many, many millions of people.”

* When he did get the nomination but fell way behind Hillary Clinton in the polls, he became convinced he was going to lose. That’s when he declared that the election was “rigged” and was being stolen away from him. It certainly wasn’t his fault he was losing. He was also highly critical of the Electoral College, claiming it was tilted toward the Democrats.

But wait!

* After he won the election but lost the popular vote, he decided that the Electoral College wasn’t so bad after all, and bragged that he actually won the popular vote, too, if you deducted the 3-5 million illegal ballots that were cast.

* When he couldn’t produce any evidence of voter fraud, he changed his story again, announcing that he could have won California, New York and Illinois if he had needed them, but didn’t even try to campaign in those states because he had the Electoral College all sewed up.

* Fast-forward to his latest CYA that came in a recent interview with Reuters, when Trump revealed that he liked his old job, misses driving a car, can’t go anywhere he wants and thought the president’s job would be much easier. I found those comments to be surprisingly candid for a man who hasn’t told the truth twice in the same week since he started running for office.

Why would he say those things, unless he had an ulterior motive…like, say, greasing the skids for his resignation should he find himself on the verge of impeachment?

I can envision a scenario in which the Russia scandal intensifies and people like Mike Flynn, Carter Page and Paul Manafort start being arrested for various crimes and face some serious prison time unless they go on the record and connect Trump to the scandal. If impeachment became a real possibility, I can see Trump leaving a resignation letter on the corner of the Resolute Desk, pardoning all of his co-conspirators on his way out the Oval Office door and tweeting about that long-rumored Trump Network he wants to start with his racist buddy Steve “Breitbart” Bannon.

I can almost hear Trump now, bending the airwaves on his first broadcast to tell us what a great president he was:

"I did more in my 20 weeks in office than any other president did in four or eight years. I took the job to make America great again, and I did that bigly and in record time. That’s why I resigned. There was no reason to stick around any longer when I had already accomplished more than any president in history ever did or ever will. I inherited a mess, a total mess...but I cleaned it up and went out on top, like I always do, and no one will ever surpass what I was able to accomplish in such a short period of time. People are saying I'm the greatest president of all time. That I will tell you. And now a word from our sponsor. Ivanka...you're up, honey.”

It’s what he had planned all along.  You believe that, right?