DJT is a narcissist. He’s completely batshit nuts. He’s stupid, but he thinks, no, is convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else.
He’s a plotter and a schemer that has never heard of the KISS principle. He makes grand and complex plans that so full of “smart” ideas they rapidly fall apart. When they do so the narcissism kicks on full-bore and that failure MUST have been because somebody sabotaged his plan, because it was so smart it couldn’t have failed on its own, fallen under the weight of its own innate “cleverness”
I know this personality type, I’ve met them at work and in my personal life and, to an outside observer, they blunder from one disaster to the next while personally feeling ever more put-upon and victimised. Throwing everyone else they can reach under whatever buses happen to be handy because of their “disloyalty.”
And in this latest turn of “The Decline and Fall of the House of Trump” I see the recognizable shards of such a scheme.
He took all those boxes of documents with him when he left. If he could have held onto them, fine, but he knew that eventually somebody would ask for ‘em back and that it would look really bad if he didn’t hand ‘em over. So, before anyone asked for ‘em back he extracted a few, figuring he could give the rest back and nobody would notice. Why? Because they were his escape fund.
If he hadn’t had an escape strategy then when the wheels started to come off he’d have been hiding under his rock and pulling his usual strategy of just trying to keep everything tied up in the courts so long that he could get a way with a fine, which he’d pay with money he’d already bilked out of someone else. The fact that he is still publicly doubling down means that — up until now, at least — he thought he had a get out of jail free card he could still play anytime he wanted to.
These retained documents were to be the fee for the unannounced departure from Mar-a-Lago to a Russian dacha that Putin had already stolen from some oligarch on his shit-list.
Except, now they are gone. What’s worse, the strategy he’s been following while relying on having them has painted him into a corner his usual tactics can’t get him out of. This realisation is going to sink in at some point.
When it does, he’s too much of a coward to commit suicide as many other narcissist would-be dictators have done. Watch for him suddenly becoming even more deranged and desperate in his rhetoric and whip up even more of the equally disturbed individuals in his cult to even more insane and extreme acts.