Thread by @PalmerReport

Barr comes into office, commits felony obstruction, gets caught.

Has since been trying to earn a pardon by doing things like meddling in the Stone case.

Trump repays Barr by hanging the Stone meddling around Barr’s neck.

Barr still needs a pardon, keeps digging a deeper hole.

Of course Barr knows he can’t actually get Stone’s sentence reduced. Barr is counting on the judge having always planned to give Stone less than 7-9 years, so Barr can falsely take credit for the “reduction.” Barr is counting Trump being clueless enough to fall for this ruse.

Of course none of these facts fit with the prevailing narrative that Bill Barr is an evil wizard who just waves a magic wand and always gets what he wants. The danger of getting your political analysis from TV is you end up believing silly simplistic false narratives like this.

In reality Bill Barr has struck out with most of what he’s tried. DOJ IG report. Fake McCabe indictment. Trump is a rube but even he must eventually figure out each of these Barr schemes has been a failure. So Barr just keeps trying to find a way to earn that pardon.

So you’ve got Barr trying to con Trump into believing that Barr’s lame and ineffective antics are helping.

And you’ve got Trump playing Barr, in terms of forcing Barr to commit more and more crimes in endless pursuit of that pardon he needs.

These two clowns deserve each other.

By the way, these half-assed Stone antics prove just how hesitant Trump is to pardon any of his co-conspirators.

Cable news has spent the past three years insisting pardons would rain down at any minute.

But pardons aren’t magic wands. Pardoning a co-conspirator is highly risky

Trump’s smart move would be to wail til he loses the election, then pardon everyone (including himself) on his way out the door. There would be legal battles, and some/all pardons could be annulled. But either way he wouldn’t pay a political price, due to the timing.

But look how frail Stone is. He doesn’t want to be in solitary til November. And he’s got ugly dirt on Trump.

So Trump has to weigh pardoning Stone now, even though it would trigger court rulings over pardon powers that could prevent Trump from pardoning himself/kids later.

Most pundits pretend it’s not the case, and many of you tell me to shut up whenever I talk about it, but the key to all of this is that if Trump loses the election he’s immediately arrested and never gets out of prison. His actions have long made clear that he understands this.

New York State has a grand jury targeting Trump for indictment. Well documented by court filings. And it’s a given that the next DOJ will want to make an example out of him with federal charges, after what he’s done to the DOJ.

100% chance Trump is arrested if he loses election.

This isn’t “optimism.” It’s just something that’s obviously going to happen. You’d need a dump truck of doomsday hysteria and a wild fever dream to convince yourself that he’s somehow magically not going to be arrested if he loses. Trump knows it; why don’t you know it?

But because we ignore the reality that Trump knows he’ll be arrested if he loses, we misinterpret much of what he does.

His hesitance over risky pardons is because he’s trying to save it for himself.

He “moved out of” New York because he resents the arrest he’s facing there.

Ask yourself why, despite three years of nonstop pardon hysteria on MSNBC and CNN, Trump never has pardoned any of his co-conspirators.

It’s because pardons aren’t magic wands.

Trump is an idiot, and even he understands how costly it could be to pardon Stone. Why don’t you?

So why have so many MSNBC and CNN been willing to look so foolish for the past three years by insisting magic pardons would rain down at any minute? Simple: you’ve never once changed the channel while they were talking about pardons.

It scares you into staying tuned in. RATINGS.

You’ve never changed the channel while they were hyping pardon hysteria, or insisting Mueller would be fired at any second, or insisting Barr has magic powers, or predicting that Trump will win in 2020. These narratives bring automatic high ratings. TV channels exist for ratings.

If Trump does decide that pardoning Stone is necessary despite the immense cost, the TV pundits will say “see, our pardon hysteria over the past three years was right all along.” The fatalists will say “see, Trump was always going to use magic pardons to finish us all off.”

The cheapest path to success in political punditry is to “earnestly” tell your side that the most unlikely worst case scenario is going to happen. People think “he’s not sugar coating it.” Then when it doesn’t happen, your side is too relieved to realize you’ve tricked them.

Then when I point out that these doomsday scenarios from other pundits aren’t realistic, and I urge everyone to instead focus on the less-histrionic bad stuff that’s actually happening, I’m told that I’m too “optimistic” or that I’m “selling false hope.”