He just...tweeted it out

Sorry everyone, I’m afraid I’m going to have to do a bit of smug posting this morning. It’s not noble, but hopefully you will find it just as funny as I have. So yesterday Trump Tweeted, or uh Xed, or uh, what do you call it on Truth Social, he Trumpeted? A litle thingy.

Now, fans of this particular email newsletter will be familiar with the possibility of Trump fleeing the country, which I speculated about with great mirth a few weeks ago. He is already thinking about the method he’ll need to take to get out of the country, weighing options—the thought has more than just occurred to him, he’s making plans behind the scenes about how to do it.

As we know from 8 years of watching this strategy unfold, Trump uses social media to prepare the ground for his actions by denying that they could ever happen. This works in a simple way: Trump seeds the idea that he might do something in the mind of his followers through denial. This gets them thinking about the possibility while giving them readymade talking points to both argue against its possibility and, ultimately, when he does it, fantasize that it’s actually just a false flag, seeding their paranoid and conspiracist denials of the truth with a half-baked logical argument. He uses his followers to build a discursive clusterfuck around something that hasn’t even happened yet, so that when it happens, the terrain of discussion will be whether or not it actually happened, not, like, what it means or what its consequences might be.

Meanwhile liberals laugh at this denialiasm, or argue against its content, its logic, so that, by the time he actually does the fucked up thing he has been promising to do, they get stuck debating about obvious reality, imagining that somehow they can convince the people who get power and pleasure from this game that the facts matter. Liberals get pleasure from this game too, however! They get to live smugly in reality, while their opponents are drunk on lies, and so with great relish they demolish talking points that were never meant to actually win an argument, experiencing the exact same resentment and dehumanization of their opponents that the conspiracists cultivate. It’s awesome!

The high-minded impulse is to quote Sartre here:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

But honestly, and perhaps more appropriately, Trump’s entire discourse strategy is the “My t-shirt is raising a lot of questions” meme format

So if Trump is going to flee the country, Russia does make sense as a final destination for him, seeing as it is a place where he has business connections, currently a sanctioned country at war, which makes it a rather dismal target for extradition. But the question is, will he slip out in the middle of the night, or will he pull a high-publicity stunt?

I think the man might pull some really brazen stage-magician bullshit, like, for example, having his jet fly from Mar-a-Lago to a trial appointment somewhere, without him on the plane. While the media waits in an airport to snap photos of his arrival, he is already on a buddy’s plane headed either directly for Russia, or for some intermediary country where he will attempt to hide out before going onward to Russia (although as my dear friend Mia pointed out, he is more likely to go straight to Russia to avoid the whole Edward Snowden Ecuador situation.)

This gives his staff and followers the chance to be martyrs in the cause, to nobly and symbolically sacrifice themselves for his escape. The plane doors open and, wait, by god, I think that’s Giuliani’s music! That’s not the president, that’s America’s Mayor, and he’s reading a statement!

Of course, there is some risk in flying over European airspace—while it would be kind of hilarious, it is unlikely an EU nation is going to shoot his plane down, but they might be able to force him to ground by scrambling jets and threatening. So he might just go West. If he spends time stumping in the West coast or SW, that’s probably a good time to watch for him to jump bail.

But most importantly, if he does leave the country, send a meme or a laugh or just a good thought your girl’s way. Because I, for one, will be filled with mirth.