Everything that can happen to Donald Trump after the White House
Hunted by creditors and judges, lacking presidential immunity, Trump could return to TV, his old love, or flee abroad. if there is anything we have learned from this president it is to expect the unexpected
Now that the U.S. election has reached a point of no return, with major networks giving Joe Biden the votes needed to take over the White House, with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg siding with the former vice president, the front Republican who is starting to show cracks and all the major world leaders who have congratulated the Democratic candidate (except Vladimir Putin), one question remains in the air: what will he do after the incumbent president, who at the moment still has control of the nuclear codes and the main levers of command of the richest, most powerful and armed democracy on Earth?
For the moment Donald Trump is a broken record. He has disappeared from the public scene for days but continues to engage on social networks to spread theses (unsubstantiated by the facts) on the victory that would have been stolen from the fraud of the opponents and the complacency of the local authorities. This attitude has meant that in some tours, including in Europe, news such as those of the states removed from Biden from this or that television have spread, and which would therefore bring the former vice president of Obama under 270 electors or even in poised. In reality, the only state in the balance (but pending for Biden) is Georgia, and in any case when a recount is done there (by hand) the margin in favor of the Dems is tens of thousands of votes. We are a far cry from the infamous 538 votes on which the duel between Al Gore and George Bush was played in 2000.
While most of the Republican Party still sides with Trump and refuses to recognize Biden (except for four senators and a few neocon theorists, who still matter little), the president has torpedoed the FBI chief, the Pentagon chief and the head of the Nsa in a few days, not a coup, but not even the sign of a healthy democracy. For one thing: in Defense, in the place of Mark Esper, the man who opposed the use of the military against Black Lives Matter, Trump has placed former director of counterterrorism Christopher Miller.
In this sense, those who still support Trump - even in our latitudes - are now openly rooting for the conflict that he is now evidently trying to provoke, as if it were a kind of ethno-nationalist Allende who refuses to be martyred in the White House and makes everyone pay for it.
Get a severance pay
There could be far more materialistic motives in Trump's well-poisoning strategy: putting his resume in order to look for a new job in 2021 If not even an unlikely turnaround in Georgia could save his election and the Supreme Court could shortly, the current paralysis of US politics can serve Trump to solve some problems of the GOP, before changing the air: the frantic sending of emails to supporters (up to 28 a day), with tones of civil war, asking for help to financing the recount campaign hides a diabolical mechanism: essentially, depending on the size of the cash donations, a large portion of each is not ending up in the recount bet, but in the sponsoring organization, and in a debt-ridden Republican Party In other words, Trump spent more on his campaign than he set out in his initial budget, and now he's asking the s he weaves supporters who waited for him in line, in the cold, sometimes in rallies where coronavirus outbreaks have exploded, to repay him for the failed enterprise before removing the trouble. A bit like the rich university students who ask to sponsor them a year abroad to pet the monkeys of Borneo.
A Trump network?
In the future of the president there could also be a return to the passion of the years before the presidency: television. Trump has repeatedly told friends and confidants that he wants to start a digital media company to target the broadcaster that has betrayed him the most, Fox News, and bring with him the most conservative and liberal hostile audience.
What happened with the channel traditionally close to the right? At this juncture, Fox's ultimate fault is that he called Biden's victory in Arizona first. A decision that has sent Trump into a rage, who has sworn revenge: "Fox has changed a lot," he said during an interview released on election day. "Someone said: What is the biggest difference between this year and four years ago? And I say Fox ”. But at the base there are deeper misunderstandings: Fox has given much more space to the Democrats than the president wanted; he adopted a more politically correct language than usual, even turned off the audio from the White House spokesperson when he started lying shamelessly. Trump "intends to destroy Fox," said a source close to him at the Axios political background and analysis site.
Indeed, the president has been giving exclusive interviews and retweets for months to a channel that is under ten years old, One America Network, which according to some observers is the closest thing to North Korean propaganda that has ever been seen in the West. But there is a lot of speculation that Trump can take a quantum leap. Starting a cable channel all his own in 2021.
The problem is that getting transported on cable systems would be expensive and time-consuming. Trump would then be considering a digital media channel that would stream online, cheaper and faster to start.
Trump's digital offering would likely require a monthly fee from Maga fans. Many are already Fox News viewers, and his goal would be to suck them off the Fox Nation streaming channel ($ 5.99 per month), using a very precious advantage: the immense database of email and mobile contacts of his supporters obtained during the countryside.
The judicial troubles
With Joe Biden's victory, Trump will soon be out of work. Attention will inevitably focus on his ambitions to race again in 2024, facing a second primary war against a Republican park that will inevitably offer new competitors (two above all: the young rampant Josh Hawley or the TV tribune Tucker Carlson, a kind of Gianluigi American comparison).
But Trump's time outside his tenure could be consumed by meetings with lawyers, and possibly by sworn depositions or court testimony. At the end of January - let's not forget - Trump will lose the protections that the US legal system offers to a president in office. Starting with the most trivial one: having a Twitter profile that cannot be deleted, even in the presence of obvious fake news or insults (but at most covered with disclaimers).
Trump, 74, has been no stranger to lawsuits: he has already faced them in his long and controversial career as an entrepreneur, as a real estate developer, owner of the New Jersey Generals and bankruptcy casino tycoon. He has often worked to settle matters quietly, behind the scenes, and never admitting any wrongdoing. However, his former president profile could make it difficult.
Among the causes in which he could be entangled starting from January 2021 are the money passed under the table by his lawyer Michael Cohen, in 2016, to two women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Trump; money that gave way to an investigative storm that extended to banking, tax and insurance fraud, as well as the falsification of corporate documents. Then there is the question of taxes not paid by Trump in the years of his presidency, which emerged with an investigation by the New York Times (which is quite irrelevant in the result of the elections), of the woman who accused him of raping her at the beginning of the Ninety (E. Jean Carroll) and a fraudulent marketing affair in which the son-in-law is also involved. Of course, a lot will depend on the goodness of the Democrats and the new guardian of the Justice Department.
The flight abroad
The most incredible hypothesis, worthy of a spy-story. Putting his conduct as president aside for the moment, what is certain is that Trump will face a complicated financial and legal budget as soon as he leaves office. He will no longer have protection from an avalanche of accusations and lawsuits against him, his family and the Trump Organization. He will no longer be able to claim (falsely) that his taxes are still "under control" and not available to the public. Properties and investments could be frozen, seized or their value could plummet. The true nature of his extraordinary personal financial debt - recently reported as $ 421 million - will be exposed, and his likely foreign creditors could blackmail him. If the worst predictions come true, overturning the elections would indeed be Trump's last concern.
Purely to speculate with the imagination, then imagine a Trump who is using these days to plan a stealth departure during the 10 weeks leading up to inauguration day, while he still has the protection of legal immunity as president in office. Leaving US airspace before he regains his private citizen status at noon on January 20 would allow him to flee, or at least delay his face-to-face with creditors and judges. Classic indicators of readiness for such a move include the rapid sale of domestic properties and investments, and a quiet build-up of offshore wealth, beyond the reach of US authorities. Trump's family members and trusted corporate staff would likely be fully involved in orchestrating the move.
In more than two centuries of peaceful presidential transfers of power, nothing remotely conceivable has ever happened. At a minimum, a presidential defection would temporarily absorb the resources and attention of a wide range of US defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. The escape of a commander-in-chief would be unprecedented, unsettling and deeply disturbing. But if there is anything we have learned from this president, it is to expect the unexpected.
