How Long Will The Trump Family Be Able To Maintain Their Lifestyle By Grifting?

Like most DWT readers, I would like to see Trump rotting in prison for the rest of his miserable life. Alas, that's probably as likely as me waking up tomorrow with a pet unicorn in my backyard. But this morning Wall Street Journal reporters Brian Spegele and Caitlin Ostroff painted a different kind of hell that awaits a post-Oval Office Trump, one that may be a more realistic expectation-- a reckoning for his business sparked by "some of the deepest financial and legal challenges in his family business empire in decades. No matter what he focuses on after the presidency, the businesses will require his attention. Two New York investigations will continue after he leaves office and the Trump Organization will need to avert a potential cash crunch caused by looming debt maturities at the firm’s real estate holdings. Personal guarantees Mr. Trump made on some of the organization’s debt add urgency to shoring up its financial position."

Expanding his business interests into China may not be as easy as it once looked, since he is now loathed and distrusted there. And his brand is not just crap in Europe, some of his trademarks have been eliminated by legal challenges.

Spegele and Ostroff asserted that "the Trump Organization might soon slim down. Several properties are for sale, including its Washington hotel and two skyscrapers in New York and San Francisco that are part-owned by the Trump Organization. The organization also has been considering selling its Seven Springs estate outside of New York" to help avert a lending crunch of more than $400 million of debt due in the next few years. They wrote that "many lenders have indicated they are wary of doing business" with Trump, who has been exposed worldwide as an amoral, ethics-free crook and sociopath.

It is unknown whether Mr. Trump will want to resume an active management role. When elected, he turned over management of the business to his sons Eric and Donald Jr. while keeping ownership. Some Trump associates predict the president will return to his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower in New York. “He won’t be able to help himself,” longtime friend and business partner Phil Ruffin previously told The Journal.

Others, including former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney expect he could run for president again. Mr. Mulvaney said in recent days he “would absolutely put him on the shortlist of people likely to run in 2024.”

Since Mr. Trump launched his run for the presidency in 2015, his businesses have become closely linked with the GOP.

Republican spending at Trump properties has topped $23 million since 2015 compared with less than $200,000 in the five years prior, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Those revenues will likely decline, including $37,000 of monthly rent payments the Trump campaign has made to Trump Tower in New York. The office tower, where the Trump Organization is based, has suffered from falling occupancy rates since Mr. Trump took office...

Financial challenges facing the Trump Organization are compounded by long-running legal issues, with New York probes of Mr. Trump’s businesses set to continue after he leaves office. Mr. Trump has also been contending with an Internal Revenue Service audit of his finances.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat, has been pursuing years of Mr. Trump’s financial records, and says criminal tax fraud and falsification of business records are among the laws investigators believe may have been broken. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to block a subpoena for the records, arguing the request was overbroad and issued in bad faith.

Another investigation, by New York state’s Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat, is examining whether Mr. Trump inflated asset values to obtain loans and get other economic and tax benefits. The Trump Organization has called the investigations politically motivated and denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Trump is unusual among U.S. presidents because much of the legal scrutiny he faces today stems from actions before he became president, said Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“The fact that Trump thought he could run for president and be president with potential clear irregularities in his financial background and not be discovered, that’s the most surprising part to me,” he said. “It reinforces that he did not fully appreciate what it meant to be president.”

With Mr. Trump in the White House, the Trump Organization said it has put foreign deal-making on hold. But Eric Trump said in an interview this summer that growing internationally would be a key focus when his father left office.

Polls suggest that Mr. Trump’s strident nationalism and trade protectionism made him unpopular in many countries, including China, where he previously sought to benefit from the country’s growth.

...In Scotland, meanwhile, the Trump Organization spent more than $100 million to buy and renovate the Trump Turnberry golf resort. That property hasn’t turned a profit since Mr. Trump bought it in 2014, records show. This summer, around 70 staffers at Turnberry were cut, say former employees.

The Trump Organization said it has been investing heavily in Turnberry to make it one of the world’s top golf resorts.

Those challenges notwithstanding, the Trump family says it believes the president’s supporters will stick with them. For example, Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., will still be a draw, said member Whitney Schneider. “People will always want to see Mar-a-Lago and they’ll always want to see where the president lives,” she said.

Can a family maintain billionaire status as notorious grifters? I'm sure they plan to try and for at least a few years, they should be very successful at it, given the relationship between Señor T and 72,936,343 American voters (47.3%). And Trump is also popular among large segments of the population in fascist countries like Hungary and Israel. As Ron Reagan, Jr. noted last month, "We've got a bunch of grifters there in the White House."

Trumpist Contemplates Trump's Rejection By The Voters: "Sometimes You Own The Libs; Sometimes The Libs Own You"

 

Lame Duck by Nancy Ohanian

Today everyone is writing about how depressed Trump is and how bleak his mood is. Awwwww.... The NY Times reported that Señor Trumpanzee "has spent his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters. But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president." Whew.

The Washington Post's David Nakamura noted that Trump Is In Hiding. He wrote that yesterday, "six American service members were killed in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission in Egypt. Tropical Storm Eta made landfall in North Florida, contributing to severe flooding. The number of Americans infected with the novel coronavirus continued at a record-setting pace, sending the stock market tumbling. At the White House, President Trump spent the day as he has most others this week-- sequestered from public view, tweeting grievances, falsehoods and misinformation about the election results and about Fox News’s coverage of him. Neither he nor his aides briefed reporters on the news of the day or reacted to Democratic leaders who accused Republicans of imperiling the pandemic response by 'refusing to accept reality' over the election results."

In her Times column, The Post-Presidency of a Con Man, Michelle Goldberg took comfort "in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect-- by initiating new grifts. Trump has been sending out frantic fund-raising requests to 'defend the election,' but as the New York Times reports, most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that 'will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.' Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal. These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office... But there are reasons to think that when he is finally ejected from the White House, he will become a significantly diminished figure."

Once Trump is no longer president, he is likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to patronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could complete the transition from Trump’s enabler to his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish self-abasement, Republicans with presidential aspirations will have an incentive to help take him down.

“His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attorney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I have to assume that, given the amount of civil litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s going to be at a completely new dimension.”

...It’s too much to expect any sudden exposure of Trump. There will be no cathartic moment when everyone realizes that the emperor was always naked. But the question isn’t whether Trump’s support will evaporate. It’s whether it will erode, especially once he loses the ability to make Republican dreams come true.

Besides, the threats to Trump are not only to his reputation, such as it is. In Bob Woodward’s book Fear, he wrote that Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd implored the president not to testify in Robert Mueller’s probe because he believed him to be an inveterate liar. (Dowd has denied this.) Should Trump face depositions in these civil cases, however, he’ll have no choice about submitting to interviews.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s former deputy, told me he expects Trump to pardon himself for any federal crimes he might have committed. That would mean that even if a Biden Department of Justice wanted to take the extraordinary step of prosecuting a former president, it would also have to litigate the constitutionality of self-pardons, a complicated, time-consuming process.

But he might face state charges that he can’t pardon his way out of. New York State Attorney General Letitia James has a civil investigation into possible financial chicanery by the Trump Organization. Trump is under criminal investigation by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance. While the scope of the probe is unknown, his office’s filings suggest Vance could be looking at tax fraud, insurance fraud and falsification of business records.

The “Manhattan DA’s office is a really good office, and they’ve done a lot of white-collar cases,” said Weissmann. “If they were to prove-- this is now hypothetical-- but if they were to prove tens of millions of dollars in tax fraud or bank fraud, people go to jail for that.”

Let’s say Trump, ever the escape artist, avoids prison, setting himself up as the warlord of MAGA-world at Mar-a-Lago. His post-presidency still won’t be easy. As The Times has reported, he’s personally on the hook for $421 million in debt, most of it coming due in the next four years. If a long fight with the I.R.S. goes against him, he could owe at least $100 million more.

“Mr. Trump still has assets to sell,” The Times reported. “But doing so could take its own toll, both financial and to Mr. Trump’s desire to always be seen as a winner.”

Trump is already trying to profit off his avid base, and he will surely continue. But it’s an open question whether, without the intoxicating aura of presidential power, he can sustain their devotion. There are several examples of once-formidable right-wing leaders reduced to footnotes after leaving office.

As Republican House majority leader, Tom DeLay was frequently described as the most powerful man in Congress. Then, in 2005, he was indicted on a charge of campaign money laundering. Though his 2010 conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, the last time he had any significant public profile was when he appeared on Dancing With the Stars in 2009.

Sarah Palin, too, was once a Republican icon; in many ways she presaged Trump. “Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party,” said a New York Times headline just before the 2008 election. It quoted right-wing activist Brent Bozell: “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proved that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.”

But since resigning as Alaska’s governor in 2009, Palin has lost her luster. Once a likely presidential prospect, she recently made headlines for wearing a pink and purple bear costume on the Fox reality show The Masked Singer.

Trump is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

After all that, could he be back in 2024? Of course. Trump is, if nothing else, relentless. But this election was just the latest reminder that he is far from invincible. When he is no longer in office, there will be many more.

One of my favorite of today's Trump woe-is-me tails was a "re-release" of Jane Mayer's Nov. 1 column: Why Trump Can't Afford To Lose. Can you imagine this scene of Trumpanzee despondency the day before the election?

Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options. He wasn’t especially religious, but, as daylight faded outside the rapidly emptying White House, he fell to his knees and prayed out loud, sobbing as he smashed his fist into the carpet. “What have I done?” he said. “What has happened?” When the President noted that the military could make it easy for him by leaving a pistol in a desk drawer, the chief of staff called the President’s doctors and ordered that all sleeping pills and tranquillizers be taken away from him, to insure that he wouldn’t have the means to kill himself.

No? Me either... besides, it was Nixon, not Trump. Still, Mayer notes that "No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses... the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, 'If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.' Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden."

She notes that the Financial Times estimates that, "in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets-- or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties-- especially his hotels and resorts-- have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. 'It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,' Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me."

Last winter, a Cabinet secretary told me Trump had confided that he couldn’t imagine returning to his former life as a real-estate developer. As the Cabinet secretary recalled, the two men were gliding along in a motorcade, surrounded by throngs of adoring supporters, when Trump remarked, “Isn’t this incredible? After this, I could never return to ordering windows. It would be so boring.”

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Trump’s national poll numbers have lagged behind Biden’s, and two sources who have spoken to the President in the past month described him as being in a foul mood. He has testily insisted that he won both Presidential debates, contrary to even his own family’s assessment of the first one. And he has raged not just at the polls and the media but also at some people in charge of his reëlection campaign, blaming them for squandering money and allowing Biden’s team to have a significant financial advantage. Trump’s bad temper was visible on October 20th, when he cut short a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl. A longtime observer who spent time with him recently told me that he’d never seen Trump so angry.

The President’s niece Mary Trump-- a psychologist and the author of the tell-all memoir Too Much and Never Enough-- told me that his fury “speaks to his desperation,” adding, “He knows that if he doesn’t manage to stay in office he’s in serious trouble. I believe he’ll be prosecuted, because it seems almost undeniable how extensive and long his criminality is. If it doesn’t happen at the federal level, it has to happen at the state level.” She described the “narcissistic injury” that Trump will suffer if he is rejected at the polls. Within the Trump family, she said, “losing was a death sentence-- literally and figuratively.” Her father, Fred Trump, Jr., the President’s older brother, “was essentially destroyed” by her grandfather’s judgment that Fred was not “a winner.” (Fred died in 1981, of complications from alcoholism.) As the President ponders potential political defeat, she believes, he is “a terrified little boy.”

Barbara Res, whose new book, Tower of Lies, draws on the eighteen years that she spent, off and on, developing and managing construction projects for Trump, also thinks that the President is not just running for a second term-- he is running from the law. “One of the reasons he’s so crazily intent on winning is all the speculation that prosecutors will go after him,” she said. “It would be a very scary spectre.” She calculated that, if Trump loses, “he’ll never, ever acknowledge it-- he’ll leave the country.” Res noted that, at a recent rally, Trump mused to the crowd about fleeing, ad-libbing, “Could you imagine if I lose? I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country-- I don’t know.” It’s questionable how realistic such talk is, but Res pointed out that Trump could go “live in one of his buildings in another country,” adding, “He can do business from anywhere.”

It turns out that, in 2016, Trump in fact made plans to leave the United States right after the vote. Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump supporter who served briefly as the White House communications director, was with him in the hours before the polls closed. Scaramucci told me that Trump and virtually everyone in his circle had expected Hillary Clinton to win. According to Scaramucci, as he and Trump milled around Trump Tower, Trump asked him, “What are you doing tomorrow?” When Scaramucci said that he had no plans, Trump confided that he had ordered his private plane to be readied for takeoff at John F. Kennedy International Airport, so that the next morning he could fly to Scotland, to play golf at his Turnberry resort. Trump’s posture, Scaramucci told me, was to shrug off the expected defeat. “It was, like, O.K., he did it for the publicity. And it was over. He was fine. It was a waste of time and money, but move on.” Scaramucci said that, if 2016 is any guide, Trump would treat a loss to Biden more matter-of-factly than many people expect: “He’ll go down easier than most people think. Nothing crushes this guy.”

Mary Trump, like Res, suspects that her uncle is considering leaving the U.S. if he loses the election (a result that she regards as far from assured). If Biden wins, she suggested, Trump will “describe himself as the best thing that ever happened to this country and say, ‘It doesn’t deserve me-- I’m going to do something really important, like build the Trump Tower in Moscow.’”

The notion that a former American President would go into exile-- like a disgraced king or a deposed despot-- sounds almost absurd, even in this heightened moment, and many close observers of the President, including Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s first best-seller, The Art of the Deal, dismiss the idea. “I’m sure he’s terrified,” Schwartz told me. “But I don’t think he’ll leave the country. Where the hell would he go?” However, Snyder, the Yale professor, whose specialty is antidemocratic regimes in Eastern Europe, believes that Trump might well abscond to a foreign country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S. “Unless you’re an idiot, you have that flight plan ready,” Snyder said. “Everyone’s telling me he’ll have a show on Fox News. I think he’ll have a show on RT”-- the Russian state television network.

...Schwartz agreed that Trump “will do anything to make the case he didn’t lose,” and noted that one of Trump’s strengths has been his refusal to admit failure, which means that “when he wins he wins, and when he loses he also wins.” But if Trump loses by a landslide, Schwartz said, “he’ll have many fewer cards to play. He won’t be able to play the election-was-stolen-from-me card-- and that’s a big one.”

But my favorite of all was Olivia Nuzzi's The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency for New York. She wrote that by Election Day, Señor T understood that losing was inevitable. "He accepted, even if he had no plans to concede, that his presidency was over. Nevertheless, in the residence, surrounded by senior advisers and family, he was furious. About everything. He was angry things weren’t going his way. He was angry Fox had called Arizona for Biden. He was angry that Biden had gone out on TV first. Everyone was offering him different ideas about what to say to the nation, to fight or to be measured or to say this or that, contradicting each other as the president grew angrier and angrier, throwing up one hand to silence people as he reviewed notes in the other. He was unhappy with the notes. He was unhappy with everything. And then he went out and ignored everybody who had tried to help.

[T]he campaign mounted half-assed legal fights in states they thought he still had a chance to win-- not because they thought it would bring them the election but because there wasn’t much else to do but fight. The New York Times reported that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said he was looking for a James Baker–type figure. Instead, they got Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski, and Dave Bossie. “That’s not a legal team,” one of the president’s friends told me. “It’s all so bizarre.”

This person, who speaks to the president often-- or, more accurately, who listens and says uh-huh as the president speaks-- said that Trump is not just done for, but done. “He wants to lose. He’s out of money. He worries about being arrested. He worried about being assassinated,” they said. “It hasn’t been a great experience for him. He likes showing people around the White House, but the actual day-to-day business of being president? It’s been pretty unpleasant for him.”

“A lot of what Trump says is the opposite of what he means. That’s true of all of us, to some extent,” the president’s friend said. But when Trump said he didn’t mind losing to Biden, even though he famously hates losers of any ilk, his friend believed him. “He doesn’t believe losing is shameful-- quitting is bad. Losing isn’t,” this person said. “He’s afraid. He’s the most insecure, afraid person ever. He’s too afraid to be president. He’s afraid to exercise power. He’s afraid to do the job. It’s why he’s overbearing and crazy-- he sabotages himself constantly because he hates himself and wants out. He’s always trying to hurt himself. That guy commits more self-harm than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”





...In the weeks leading up to the election, certain White House officials and people close to the president were busy laying the groundwork for a post-Trump reputational and relationship recovery tour. Trump may be holding rallies and refusing to admit Biden is a legitimately elected president on prime-time Trump TV, but the anti-professional class of operators who assumed power on his coattails know that they’ll have to shape-shift if they want to survive. I received messages from multiple staffers who said they were counting down the days until freedom from the environment they entered, and stayed in, willingly. That they had so much to tell me now that it was too late to matter very much. That they were not the same as the others around them, the people who didn’t see the place, the presidency, for what it really was.

Others didn’t feel they had anything to explain or defend. “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened,” a former White House official told me. “Live. Laugh. Love.” This person added, “Sometimes you own the libs; sometimes the libs own you.”

How Is It Possible? 40% Want This Shit Stain On History To Get Another 4 Years In The White House

 

Sociopath by Chip Proser

The U.S. is finishing up it's worst week-- in terms of new cases-- since the pandemic began... while the Trumpist regime is screaming from the rooftops that it's over, over, over, cured by Señor T. On Wednesday the U.S. reported a total of 81,811 new cases. On Thursday there were 91,834 new cases reported. Yesterday it was another 101,461 new cases, bringing the total to 9,316,297 cases. This was accompanied by 1,030 new deaths on Wednesday, 1,041 new deaths on Thursday and 988 new deaths Friday, bringing the total of Americans killed by Trump and his enablers to 235,159.

Many Americans imagine that when Trump leaves the White House we'll rarely hear from him again or that he'll spend the rest of his life being tried and in prison. But no American president has ever gone to prison and it is a stretch to imagine someone as inherently conservative as Biden will allow anything like that. writing for Politico Magazine, Garrett Graff, an author and historian, put together a realistic look at what Trump night actually do after he's ousted. The definition of Trump Graff uses to help construct his case is simple and straightforward: "A restless figure with few interests outside his own business and political career, no hobbies besides playing golf at his own properties and few traditional friends, Trump thrives on public attention and disruption; this, after all, is a man who couldn’t even spend an entire weekend cooped up inside a hospital while ill with Covid-19 earlier this month and had to take a joyride around Walter Reed Medical Center to wave to supporters." He concludes that "the Trump Era is unlikely to end when the Trump presidency ends [but with a] post-presidency as disruptive and norm-busting as his presidency has been-- one that could make his successor’s job much harder." The historians, government legal experts, national security leaders and people close to the administration consulted by Graff for his piece "outline a picture of a man who might formally leave office only to establish himself as the president-for-life amid his own bubble of admirers-- controlling Republican politics and sowing chaos in the U.S. and around the world long after he’s officially left office."

“Can he continue to make people not trust our institutions? Can he throw monkey wrenches into delicate negotiations? Absolutely,” one former Trump administration official says. “He can be a tool. He’ll be somewhere between dangerous and devastating on that extent.”

A president unwilling to respect boundaries in office is almost certain to cross them out of office. Experts envision some likely scenarios-- a much-rumored TV show and plans to use his properties to profit off his lifetime Secret Service protection, perhaps even continuing to troll the Biden administration from his hotel down Pennsylvania Avenue-- and some troubling if less certain ones, like literally selling U.S. secrets or influence to foreign governments.

Trump has already mused that maybe he’ll leave the country if he loses, but few expect him to willingly depart the American public stage. He would leave the White House with one of the largest social media platforms in the world-- including 87 million Twitter followers-- and a large campaign email list with a demonstrated small-dollar fundraising capability that could be used to aid other MAGA-friendly politicians-- or, just as likely, to sell Trump’s own wares. And he’s presumably going to need every dollar he can squeeze from his businesses and the office he will have just left. As the New York Times has been documenting, Trump has $421 million in debt coming due in the years ahead. If he leaves office, he’ll have to be busy raising the cash to pay it off.

...“He’s still the leader of a movement,” says Nancy Gibbs, a journalist and historian who co-wrote The Presidents Club about the lives of former presidents. “I’m hard pressed to recall a past president who left office with a movement intact that wasn’t transferred to someone else. I don’t see him giving it up.”

Which means, from even those first minutes, Trump’s post-presidency would almost certainly be unlike anything America-- or the world-- has ever experienced. Assuming he’s able to settle any legal challenges arising from the presidency and doesn’t spend the rest of his days in tax court in New York state, Trump as a 74-year-old man has a normal life expectancy of around 11 years, and most former presidents actually far outlive the average American, so he might have a couple decades to disrupt the world’s most exclusive club of ex-presidents.

“It’s a safe bet that many of the rules and patterns of past presidents will not apply to him,” says Gibbs. “I long ago stopped putting limits on what he might do or sell. There are no boundaries.”

A career salesman will find himself with more connections around the world than he’s ever had before-- and also with more grievances against people he feels mistreated him and forced him from office prematurely. “I put two years as the over-under on groundbreaking for Trump Tower Moscow,” says one former national security official. “It’ll be a huge F.U. to all the Russia coup plotters.”

...As he leaves office, Trump would have the chance to decide how and where to set up his post-presidential life—and where to direct a spigot of taxpayer dollars that will continue to flow to him for the rest of his life. Former presidents are eligible for a range of taxpayer-paid benefits, including a roughly $200,000-a-year pension for life, about a million-dollars-a-year for travel and office expenses, and so-called “franking privileges,” the ability to send mail postage-free. The law does stipulate that such offices have to be inside the U.S., so that would prohibit Trump from using the funds to set up his office in, say, a non-extradition country.

Trump would even have the right to use a special government-owned townhouse on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, reserved exclusively for former presidents visiting Washington, although it seems hard to imagine Trump foregoing the chance to stay in his own hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue.

...Where Trump will set up “home” is an open question: He moved his voting residence from New York to Florida last year-- so it seems unlikely he’ll return to set down roots in Manhattan-- but in converting the 17-acre Mar-a-Lago into a private club, he agreed years ago that he couldn’t live there year-round and the club closes for the unpleasant Florida summer, so he’ll have to find a second home elsewhere. If he declares that he’ll be living permanently at some combination of Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower in New York, and the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Secret Service might well be paying millions of dollars to the Trump Organization for years to come.

Then there's the possibility of a Donald J. Trump Presidential Library (and garish theme park), which you'll need go to the link to read about.

It’s possible that, if he loses reelection, Trump may wake up January 21 in Mar-a-Lago and find himself exiled and forgotten by a Republican Party eager to move past him. It’s possible too that Trump will decide to forget about Twitter, bury @realDonaldTrump and live out his days quietly golfing with his friends and admirers and holding court at the Mar-a-Lago buffet in the evenings, before settling in to watch Sean Hannity’s show in peace and silence.

Possible, but unlikely. Trump, unloved by his father, has spent his entire life craving public adulation and attention and possesses a unique-- almost algorithmic-- understanding of how to maximize the spotlight shining on himself. Almost everyone agrees he seems likely to want to remain in the public eye-- setting up a novel circumstance where a new president might assume office while being critiqued publicly minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour by his predecessor.

Ex-presidents of both parties usually go out of their way to stay quiet, at least for some period of time after leaving office. In March 2009, in his first speech as a former president, George W. Bush said he wouldn’t critique Obama at all. “He deserves my silence,” Bush said. Eight years later, in their first meeting post-election, Obama told Trump, “We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.” Later, explaining why he’d stayed almost silent even as the Trump administration unraveled so much of his legacy, Obama said in 2018 as he eased back onto the public stage, “Truth was, I was also intent on following a wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices and new ideas. We have our first president, George Washington, to thank for setting that example.”

It’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump’s abiding by any of those sentiments—it’s hard to even imagine Trump’s Twitter fingers staying still all the way through a Joe Biden inaugural address.

Meanwhile, there’s reason to believe the Republican Party may not be quick to turn on Trump, even if he’s badly defeated on Tuesday.

In fact, ironically, the bigger the GOP wipeout that accompanies a Trump defeat, the more Trump would likely continue to control the remnants of the party. Trump’s ascendency since 2016 has dramatically rearranged the ranks of the Republican Party in Washington and nationally; roughly half of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 at the start of his term are already gone or retiring. Any sort of broad loss on Tuesday would further wash away the very swing districts and candidates most inclined to move beyond Trump, leaving just the most solidly Republican districts-- GOP areas where Trump’s approval ratings remain sky-high and whose representatives would conceivably be the last to risk abandoning him. Republican candidates even far down the ballot are competing over who loves Trump more, and Trump’s scattershot approach to policy-making and betrayal of long-held conservative beliefs means the only ideology that unifies his party today is adulation of him (and, perhaps, the QAnon conspiracy theory). The intellectual inconsistency of the current party was made all too clear by the summer decision at the Republican National Convention to forego a traditional party platform and simply offer a blanket endorsement of whatever Trump wanted to do in a second term.

Instead, Trump-- and his all-powerful Twitter feed and fundraising list-- might become the party’s most reliable megaphone and kingmaker, akin to the role Sarah Palin played in 2010 amid the rise of the Tea Party after her 2008 defeat as John McCain’s running mate. In that sense, it’s possible that the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race would actually be the most MAGA-friendly GOP primaries yet, conducted almost entirely on a stage designed by Trump himself, with supplicants parading through Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and an entire generation of GOP stars molded in his image. And that’s even before considering the Trump family’s direct influence-- say a titanic Ivanka vs. AOC campaign in New York for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in 2022 or Donald Jr.’s campaign for Congress (or even the presidency) in 2024, as he becomes the next-generation MAGA standard-bearer.

This path of influence might prove one of the most stable visions ahead, assuming a relative level of normalcy from a man who has time and again demonstrated anything but. In fact, this entire piece and its imagined premise of a Trump post-presidency assumes that Trump and those around him at least superficially, if not graciously, accept a loss and that he is content to just grumble loudly from the political balcony à la Statler and Waldorf in The Muppets.

There are darker visions and scenarios in which Trump never does accept a 2020 defeat, is pushed reluctantly from the White House in January, and moves to assume some more explicit mantle of a wronged leader-in-exile. Al Gore, after his acrimonious defeat, traveled across Europe and grew a beard, rather than setting up an opposition government in the lobby of the Willard Hotel across from the White House. But imagine if he had wanted to contest the election long past inauguration day?

...Almost no matter his approach to his successor-- merely disgruntled or actively hostile-- Trump will surely want to be listened to, which is why he might look for a platform to keep himself in steady communication with the national movement of the disaffected he's fostered over the last two years as he seized and remade the Republican Party.

...Rumors have long circulated that the Trump family would try to build its own media empire. Some have speculated that in 2016 Trump had been planning to launch “Trump TV” if, as even he expected, he lost the presidency to Hillary Clinton; one reporter even swore to me he saw a sign on the camera riser at Trump’s election night victory celebration reserving a spot for “Trump TV.” Earlier this year, there was conjecture that the Trump family and its backers might be interested in boosting and formally partnering with One America News (OAN), the upstart Fox challenger that has become an all-but unofficial Trump TV.

The scenarios go on forever. Keep reading if you can stomach more of this. And if you can't... remember this: Trump is the Typhoid Mary of the Covid pandemic. A CNN investigation of 17 Trump campaign rallies between August 17 and September 26 found that 14 of the host counties had an increased rate of new Covid-19 cases one month after the rally.