WHAT NEXT FOR TRUMP?

Nothing good. Trump is going to have enemy armies marching toward him on multiple fronts, supported by allies who are by turns stupid, vicious, and potentially treacherous.

GARLAND MARCHES FORWARD. Trump has no path for stopping this document case. Garland has many areas to explore in this case alone, let alone any criminal referrals he gets from the January 6 committee. He will follow the documents, find those nuclear papers if he hasn’t already, probably search the Trump Tower, figure out if Trump sold or gave away any secrets, and figure out who helped him move all that crap to Florida.

Once Garland and his gang go through those boxes, they will begin telling the world how dirty all this is. They already identified three of the crimes they will indict Trump for. They will establish a critical element, Trump’s clear intent to misuse the papers, taking them to Florida after he was out of office and had no legal reason to retain them, clinging to them for a year, blowing off a chance to give the papers back, ignoring the FBI subpoena. He can’t claim he didn’t know mishandling intel was illegal when he was screaming insults at Hillary about that during 2016. Lock her up!

They will shoot down his lies and excuses about his magic declassification powers which have nothing to do with the charges he’ll be indicted for, about the FBI planting the evidence, and the lies his bonehead lawyer is telling, sometimes in writing. And lies about the FBI, which investigated Hillary down to her underwear, torpedoed her campaign and elected Trump, being an arm of the Democratic party.

They will remind everyone of how many times Trump carelessly handled national secrets, no matter how many times he was warned, and left them in a resort where hundreds of guests wander around.

And then Garland will release the indictment, which will be a bombshell. He would never use the phrase pre-indictment unless an indictment was coming next.

GARLAND’S ALLIES. Trump also has his other cases to worry about: tenacious investigators in New York, Georgia and on the Hill. Weisselberg, Giuliani and Graham all tried to obstruct the other cases, with little luck; Trump himself took the Fifth 400 times, but the judge has ruled that that case is moving forward. Other witnesses are sweating all this out. The Hill investigators are pounding away at the January 6 crimes and want to know why half the government employees in Washington erased their phones after the riot. The intelligence community and Congress are stepping in to help investigate the Mar-a-Lago nonsense.

TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS. Trump’s team is going to make his defense even harder. He has one new lawyer who has been caught in stupid lies, a second who doesn’t know legal strategy, and another lawyer who actually despises him, but two are really attractive women. He has clumsy Hill allies issuing absurd threats against DOJ, threatening to repeal the Espionage Act, and continuing to double-dog-dare Garland into a fight no matter how many times he punches their lights out. He has allies in the right-wing media who are urging the MAGAs to attack the FBI, and the judge who signed the warrant, and Liz Cheney. There will be more acts of violence and “demonstrations”: we could see January Six 2.0.

And Trump needs to worry about that one moment of critical mass when GOP leaders detect that he has shed enough blood that they can stomp on his corpse and pick a new king.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW YET. There are some unknowns. We don’t know what else Trump took when he was president. We don’t know where those nuclear documents are or who they may have been given to: a man who spent 4 years never reading intel reports wasn’t going to start reading them himself upon retiring. Newsweek said Trump had names of agents and sources, which would be extremely dangerous, and there is no legitimate reason whatsoever to take them.

We don’t know Trump’s intent: in addition to selling intel overseas, he might have planned to use it to blackmail Biden and Garland, to keep himself out of jail. Arrest me and I tell Putin where all our spies are! Trump apparently threatened Garland already: gee, a whole lot of my buddies are pissed off about what you’re doing to me.

We don’t know which White House aides helped Trump steal the papers. We don’t know which right-wing mutts visited Mar-a-Lago in the last 18 months, but a lot of them will piss their pants when they get subpoenas. If Jared combed through the nuclear stuff shopping for the Saudis and left his fingerprints on the papers, the FBI is dusting for prints now and Ivanka may need to get used to visitation in a federal prison yard. Also, how many janitors had master keys to that storage room, and how many of them were “exchange students” from Russia?

Another report said that when Trump knew the DOJ was interested in his Florida documents, the boxes started moving around. DOJ has 2 months of video, so if Team Trump mishandles the boxes, hides boxes, and lies about it, DOJ can indict them for all three. One of his lawyers did lie about it, so the lawyer goes down.

We will learn more when Trump’s staffers, now released from their NDAs, start talking to Rachel and writing books.

All of this gets worse.

Short version: Garland’s battle campaign is going to be well-organized and devastating. Trump’s counterattacks will be akin to a six-year-old running amok with a chain saw.