Trump's strategy: Become the bullet lodged too close to the spine.

[Tom Rinaldo]

In a nutshell Trump essentially has little faith in conventional legal strategies to defend himself against prosecution and/or impeachment. While he has not abandoned them entirely yet at this stage, when he faces a choice between speaking out "recklessly" directly to his base to rile them up to the maximum extent possible, or carefully choosing his words to limit his potential legal liability, he will go with the former over the latter.The strategy is not sheer madness on his part. It is an intentional extremely high stakes gamble, with the civil stability of our society as the ultimate stake.

Trump wants the political and "legal powers to be", those on both sides of the aisle as well as anyone who remains nonpartisan, to have greater fears over the unintended consequences of trying to remove him from office (on terms he does not agree to) than they do over the damage to our Democracy that failing to pursue all legal remedies to Trump's abuses of power and both political and personal corruption would result in. Trump is a bullet embedded in our body politic and he is doing everything possible to position himself at its spine. By that metaphor he wants to make doctors refuse to operate for fear of causing greater damage by doing so than he poses by letting him stay put where he is, at least for the rest of his first term.

Trump is laying the groundwork for potentially massive violent social unrest from an unhinged minority of Americans who have been fed an uninterrupted base diet of anger and fear for decades, boosted by Trumpoid steroids since he moved onto the center stage. Trump is weaponizing large elements of the Tea Party to fill in behind the fascists and white supremacists who are eager to become Trump's hard core shock troops. Trump is raising the specter of wide scale social unrest, if not literal civil war, should a move be made to actually depose him.

That is what Trump's full frontal attacks on the Justice system, the FBI, the intelligence community, and all non political appointees in government agencies (now re-branded as the "Deep State"" is about. That is what his unyielding attacks on the Free Press are about. That is what his demonetization of the opposition political Party (the Democrats) and high profile figures within it (think Hillary for starters) is now about. What started out more as a long shot strategy for winning the presidency (posing as the ultimate anti-establishment figure) has morphed into his long shot strategy for retaining it: "Take me down and I'll take down everything with me." It is his last resort leverage for saving his own skin.

It doesn't matter if the odds of Trump pulling this off are slim. The odds of his surviving through any other means are even slimmer. Trump is signalling that he's wearing a suicide vest and that he won't surrender before using it. The crazies who he is stoking everyday through his Twitter feed are his explosives. Trump wants our constitutional, legal and political systems to view him as a madman capable of doing anything, and he may well be, and that is his ultimate negotiating strategy. Trump has taken that stance with North Korea and Iran is likely next. To save his own hide he is taking that stance domestically also while asking, is America willing to call his bluff?