I found this NY Times opinion essay interesting:
When two or more people join together to break the law, as Michael Cohen says he and the president did, the penalties can be harsh.
By Neal K. Katyal, an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration.
The author answers this question: “ Why is it that if you sell a joint, you get a six-month sentence, and if your friend sells a joint, he gets a six-month sentence, but if you both agree to sell a single joint, you get a five-year minimum sentence? The outcomes seem really odd because it looks as if the same crime is getting different punishments.”
The answer makes perfect sense: “ The answer has to do with the harm to society when individuals agree with one another to commit criminal acts. These acts are seen as possessing a higher level of moral culpability and are also more dangerous. Two people can often do more harm than one. And those criminal economies of scale are sometimes supplemented by psychological dangers. People tend to take more risks in groups than alone. For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly. Indeed, for much of American history, conspiring to commit an immoral but not illegal act was itself punishable as conspiracy.”
Any lawyer who passed the bar knows this basic foundation of the law. I expect it is something taught in the first year of law school. Trump’s sane lawyers surely are aware of how much jeopardy Trump is in for having engaged in any conspiracy to commit a crime, whether with Michael Cohen (now proven) or the Russians (stayed tuned). What Guilanni remembers from law school and his long legal career remains to be demonstrated as he shills for Trump. (“During Mr. Giuliani’s days as a United States attorney, his office was labeled the ‘House of Pancakes’ for the parade of suspects who ‘flipped’ to try to reduce their prison sentences.” NY Times today)
The author of this OpEd writes “it would be a huge mistake for the president to rely on assurances from his legal team that what he did was ordinary and not prosecutable.” I take this a step further. Even as a non-lawyer, think commons sense suggests this would be legal malpractice to make false assurances to a client.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Trump’s lawyers are explaining this to him, but that in his addled state of mind what with his deeply held belief that he is above such niceties of the law it has not sunk in.
Some Psychology:
If and when it does dawn on Trump that his empire is falling apart around him I think we will see an escalation of rage Tweeting and rally ranting and diversionary attacks on Twitter like these:
Those who watch MSNBC have heard accounts of an inebriated Richard Nixon wandering the halls of the White House crying and talking to himself as he struggled to face the looming inevitability of the end of his presidency. As a retired therapist, I have to say that if Trump was my client I would be very concerned about his having a true psychotic break where he was so delusional and perhaps even paranoid that even his most ardent and sycophantic supporters couldn’t ignore it.
It probably won’t come to this because Trump’s psychological defense of denial has proved to be extremely strong. Of the 15 common defense mechanisms, denial is considered one of the most primitive because it is rooted in early childhood development.
If Trump ends up being removed from office either by impeachments or less likely by the 25th Amendment he won't ever accept that he brought this on himself.