Trump Got Played Too

I realize this is very small amount of extremely cold comfort after our nation just took yet another big stride into fascism, but if you need a little mug of schadenfreude to sip on while you huddle in the corner and look up tear gas remedies, please remember that Trump, in his eagerness to stay out of prison and prove whatever narcissistic point he was making, has absolutely screwed himself.

It’s not just that he has never really wanted to be President of the United States. (Yes, he wants the power and fame and dick-swinging prestige very much, but he has never wanted to do the job part of the job, and all but openly hates that part. Witness the 300-plus days he spent at Trump properties and/or golf resorts during his first presidency.)

And it’s not just that he clearly doesn’t have the stamina he used to and he has locked himself into a life of constant posturing and maneuvering instead of just fleeing to a country with plenty of beach and no extradition.

It's this: Trump is about to get shanked by the very people who put him back into office.

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, their fellow fascism-lite billionaires, and the conservative machine certainly seem to share Trump’s white supremacist sentiments, but mostly what they want is radical deregulation and geysers of money aimed at themselves. Trump is a narcissistic chaos goblin who runs on grudges and flattery. They needed whatever weird charisma he has with Republican voters who are OK with felonies, treason, racism, and sexual assault, but now that he’s in, Trump is their number one liability.

As much as Musk, Thiel, Vance, and The Heritage Foundation dig that tasty racism both as a tool and as a personal practice, actually going through with Trump’s mass deportation scheme will crash the economy and devastate the food supply chain. Remember how much everyone loved that? These guys know what will happen to the price of eggs and bacon when the farm workers are gone. And yes, the right-wing politico-media circle in which they keep vomiting lies into each other’s mouths successfully kept most Trump voters from understanding tariffs, but actually going through with Trump’s tariff plan will skyrocket prices and, again, crash the economy. The only economy-crashing plan these guys want is Trump’s tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

So the important thing right now for the people who heaved Trump back into office is to get Captain Screechlizard to stop making rash public statements and head-spinning policy changes. You see how well that worked for his campaign managers.

And that means the conservative machine is going to have to get rid of him.

It’s possible that he doesn’t realize this yet and really thinks he’s going to reign for life, but it’s more likely that Trump cut a deal in which he gets to posture for a year or two and then step aside and hand power to Vance. But you may have noticed that people don’t let go of power easily. And Trump himself has let go of power zero times. Mostly what he does is claw blindly for more. 

I’m guessing Trump sees this deal as one in which he gets to wallow around in vats of state secrets at Mar-a-Lago and still issues commands to MAGAts and still get to randomly call into television shows and still gets to be the star while Vance does the tedious part. But I’m guessing the Thiel-Musk-Vance part of that agreement is really going to need Trump to shut the hell up.

Especially if Trump is making random statements that aren’t part of the plan. And extra double especially if Trump has a bigger pull on his base than Vance does. (That latter part is pretty much guaranteed because Vance has some sort of reverse charisma that has not been fully studied by science. It’s not just anti-rizz. It’s like the uncanny valley collapsed into a black hole that sucks away the appeal of everything around it. If you sat J.D. Vance next to a basket of puppies and a plate of tacos, you would kick off a national crisis as we wrestled with how creeped out by them we are now. We must keep J.D. Vance away from RuPaul and Dolly Parton at all costs.)

All of that means that Trump is going to get shanked, and shanked hard. I don’t know if it will be an Article-25 Surprise or if they have truly vile behind-the-scenes Apprentice footage or if they simply have pockets that are deep enough to get Trump’s fair-weather rat-friends to jump to a new cruise ship, but I do know that the second Trump actually takes office and gets his cabinet into place, he stops being useful becomes a wild card and a liability. The plan has always been to shove him out of the way and put someone more pliable in his place, such as J.D. Vance, the Slinky Veep.)

(That’s the plan if he’s lucky and hasn’t been too stupid. If there was anything to the conspiracy-theorized election shenanigans, Trump is really screwed. I mean, of course, shenanigans beyond the dozens of bomb threats that happened on Election Day in heavily Democratic areas of swing states. We know those happened, and that they have been traced back to Russia. I’m talking about the position he’s in if there really was something untoward behind Trump repeatedly bragging that “we don’t need the votes; I have so many votes,” or whatever his “little secret” with speaker Mike Johnson was. If that was the case, I will refer you to Benjamin Franklin’s rule of thumb about keeping secrets. And Trump is already unable to stop bragging about them.)

Vladimir Putin, the Skipper to Trump’s Gilligan and the apparent keeper of his mushy little kumquats, is already signaling that he’s done pretending that Trump has any power—or even minimal respect—in their relationship. Now that he’s opened the door for the wolves, Trump is all but useless to Putin.  On top of that, Elon Musk has been talking to Putin frequently enough that he almost certainly has his own side deal and clearly expects to be the shadow POTUS. There’s no way Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance haven’t dipped their spoons in to make side deals of their own. They would be idiots not to.

Once he stupidly puts Tulsi freaking Gabbard into a place where she can just alleyoop our state secrets straight to Putin with no showboating middleman, Trump is dead weight. Impulsive dead weight that never could shut up and routinely throws tantrums and now seems to be going into cognitive decline. Given how Putin usually works, Trump would do well to spend the rest of his retirement below the second floor. 

Even if Putin isn’t planning on giving Trump a case of polonipneumonia, he is certainly focused on letting Donald Trump know who’s really in charge. Enlightened people know that there is nothing wrong with a woman—even a woman who has made some terrible choices and who we very much dislike—posing for nude photos if she wants to. But Putin is not an enlightened man. (Putin’s masculinity issues can be seen from Jupiter. If allowed to fully expand, Putin’s masculinity issues would fill the Hermitage and still burst out most of the windows. Can you imagine what the world would be like if Tim Walz could go back in time and teach Teen Vlad to feel his feelings and fix cars?) Broadcasting Melania Trump’s nudes on Russian television was meant to humiliate Donald. And Putin crony Nicolai Patrushev just straight-up extorted him, saying “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Not that there have been any shenanigans. I don’t know what Putin has on Trump, but you can bet they made a few copies.

Even if he isn’t in the prison cell that he has earned many times over, Donald Trump is in a cage. Everyone who worked to get him back into the Presidency has every reason to undercut, puppeteer, and humiliate him or shove him out as soon as possible.

Donald Trump is going to do his best to destroy our democracy, and we must do our best to resist him every step of the way. In trying times like these, we must take pleasure where we can. When you are feeling exhausted and let down, take a break, eat some carbs, and remember that Trump will be surrounded by people who loathe him and will heap humiliations on him every single day for the rest of his life. Go ahead and enjoy it.