It certainly feels as though everyone and their brother is out to get Donald Trump this week.
The former President, known as Teflon Don for his ability to skirt legal and political peril wholesale, is facing trouble from the DOJ, the IRS, the New York Attorney General, and the January 6th select committee…just to name a few. A great many of these probes have been dismissed by Trump as political attacks, or “witch hunts” meant to prevent him from running for office again in 2024.
The New York investigation seems to be the most dangerous at the moment, and experts are wondering if this is perhaps the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.
“He’s done,” said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, in Washington, who has accurately predicted every presidential election since 1984. “He’s got too many burdens, too much baggage to be able to run again even presuming he escapes jail, he escapes bankruptcy. I’m not sure he’s going to escape jail.”
And also, speaking to the civil designation of the NY case:
Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, noted that the civil component “involves things of particular significance to Trump and his family and his organisation, namely their ability to defraud the public, to defraud banks, to defraud insurance companies, and to continue to subsist through corruption. Without all of that corruption, the entire Trump empire is involved in something like meltdown.”
Tribe added: “Trump is probably more concerned with things of this kind than he is with having to wear an orange jumpsuit and maybe answer a criminal indictment … As a practical matter, this is probably going to cause more sleepless nights for Mr Trump than almost anything else.”
Donald Trump has insisted that even an indictment wouldn’t prevent him from running again, and there are some who’ve predicted that he may even move up the timeline of his inevitable announcement on account of the political advantage he may find in being an active office-seeker being targeted by the big, bad federal government.
