Thread by @akoz33

As expected, the end of Trump’s presidency confirmed all of the worst things Republican opponents said about him in 2016, but it also confirmed what everyone should have known all the time, which is that he was all the time a “paper tiger”, both totally unprepared for his new

and without the intelligence or mental discipline needed for successful improvisation. Far from “playing 4D-chess” he was was worse like someone who manages to lose at tic-tac-toe.
Both those who worried about Trump seizing power by some kind of coup d’etat and those who hoped

for such a thing we’re equally naive - clearly they either never understood Trump or the American political system, and usually both. Instead of a coup we got what everybody should have expected - and self-destructive uncontrollable temper tantrum and a farce (although one

resulting in several deaths) performed by some of the most grotesque character ever to appear on any stage.

But only if you look at these events dispassionately, setting aside ideology and all emotions, and think only in terns if strategy and tactics,

the full extent of Trump’s imbecility becomes clear. In fact, in spite of his inept handling of the epidemic (which is easier to criticize than to suggest a convincing alternative) his prospects going into the election were far from hopeless. All he needed was to match the

performance of the GOP and he probably would have just won. For that purpose, however, he would have needed to cease to be Trump just for a few weeks, maybe even less but we know he can barely do so for one day. But even granting that he could not have helped that, the total

unforced disaster he brought not just of the GOP but on himself puts him really in a class of his own in political history.
In fact, just before the election he got a politically very valuable gift - the Hunter Biden scandal. How much the suppression of the news about by the

social media influenced the outcome of the election is hard to tell , but there is no doubt that it had some influence. And it also would have provided Trump with a powerful political weapon after his electoral loss, if he did not chose to abandon it and pursue his totally

hopeless, in fact insane, strategy of trying to reverse the outcome by claiming electoral fraud. In fact, whether there was evidence or not of any fraud (certainly there was none in the sort of scale that could have decided the result) is much less important than the fact that

the fraud strategy inevitable lead him to accusing his own party (especially in Georgia but not only) of deliberately throwing the election to the Democrats. The idiocy of this cannot be overstated. From the moment Trump decided on this course, he was doomed. The fact that he

managed to recruit to his cause some unbelievable nut cases, just made the whole thing more grotesque, but the best legal minds and public relations grandmasters would not have achieved a better result that Lin Wood and Ruddy Giuliani.

But Trump could easily have avoided this debacle, since he had an excellently exploitable excuse for his defeat. He could have admitted that he lost the election in terms of number but insist that it only happened because of the suppression of the Biden China and Ukraine

scandals. He could have announced that he would not rest until the truth about this is fully uncovered. Had he campaigned on that issue in Georgia and not on accusing the local Republicans of treasons and having his crazies threaten them with “execution”, the GOP would have won

at least one, and quite likely both seats. That would have left Trump without Presidency but an undisputed Opposition Leader.
Controlling the Senate, he would have been in a position to turn Huntergate into Biden’s Russiagate. By not letting the Republicans drop this issue, he

would ensure that the new administration would be continually as harassed as his was. Quite possibly, a Muller-like special Counsel would have been appointed and then who knows what else could have been uncovered.
Even if Trump did not run himself in 2024, he would almost

almost certainly have been the kingmaker - a role that he still might be able to play but with much greater difficulty (and probably will fail).
And most of all, the Hunter scandal is probably dead for a long time now - or maybe only future historians will uncover what really

happened. One can find a lot of irony in this ending of the Trump drama - much more fitting a okay by Ben Jonson than by Shakespeare.