End Stage Addendum: But How?

Game Plan Template.

Because not everybody agrees with Adam Davidson (as I am inclined to do), for example, Jim Newell protesting at Slate:

Please Stop Predicting the End of Trump’s Presidency (Unless you can explain exactly how he gets impeached or why he resigns).

First, the meaning of "end stage": It doesn't mean it ends before cockcrow or in a few weeks or in less than a year or any particular time frame, at least not directly; as Davidson says,

We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point.

It means, like the end stage of a disease, that there is no longer any doubt of the outcome, though our guess as to when exactly it ends could be way off the mark. Some stage 4 cancer patients, given six months by the doctors, go on for years, others collapse and expire before they've even absorbed the prognosis. The presidency will not die of natural causes unless the president does, from too much ice cream, but it can now be called terminal, and it will not survive to November 2020. How long it lasts is dependent on a number of factors, but I think the main thing is how long it takes the Republicans to realize it has to happen, presumably by summer 2019, before the presidential campaigning gets seriously under way.

End Stage

Drawing by Mike Luckovitch, New Yorker, 3 November 2008, via Boston.com.

So which is it? Have we entered at last, with the FBI raid on Michael Cohen's various document stashes, on the "End Stage" of the Trump presidency already, as Adam Davidson has just proclaimed in The New Yorker? Or is this just another illusory moment, as Steve M suggests, where we're thinking, surely the conservatives are going to realize now what kind of schmuck they've elected to the presidency while the voters themselves are going to say, with Greg Gutfield,

when America hears Comey whine that Trump is like a Mafia boss, they go, "No shit, Sherlock. That's why we like him." ... He may be a Mafia boss, but he's our Mafia boss.

I think—for one thing—I think they're writing about different things.

Davidson's piece is really interesting, backed up with some reporting memories, of the Iraq War, when the American masses eventually began to realize what an imposture the whole project was, and shortly thereafter the mortgage crisis, when it turned out that

This is your Brooks on drugs

Reweaving. Via Houston Culture Map.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks tries his hand at Trump whispering ("Let's Go for a Win on Opioids"):

If we lived in a normal country our president would use the current moment to try to get a win — to try to pass something that would help people, demonstrate that Washington can function and rebuild his brand.

No no no, if we lived in a normal country we wouldn't be in the current moment, with a president exclusively interested in scoring wins and building his brand. As a matter of fact that is what he's doing, as far as anybody can tell, in between bouts of hanging out with his role models—