LBJ vs. DJT

By Sniffles

The situation is looking so grim for Benedict Donald that pundits are starting to speculate about The LBJ Scenario.

For those of you who weren't around or weren't paying attention on the evening of March 31, 1968, that was when Lyndon Johnson, realizing that the bottom had fallen out of his Presidency, shocked the nation. What was supposed to be an Oval Office address on the war in Vietnam ended with, "I will not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." We cats were kittens at the time, but we remember it like it was yesterday.

Johnson bowed out even without today's sophisticated, computer-driven polling and punditry, because he was a politician to the core and knew he had lost the country. Benedict Donald, on the other hand, has none of those skills. So the Beltway crowd is speculating.

This morning, the Morning Schmoes predicted that Trump will decide to be a quitter rather than a loser. "This is not a guy who is acting like he expects to be around on January 21, 2021, in the White House. And he’s acting like he’s setting everything on fire before he leaves," top Schmoe Joe Scarborough said — basing his theory on the notion that Trump would rather go down in history for the 2016 electoral stunner than for a humiliating defeat in a 2020 Biden landslide.

That argument is persuasive, but it opens so many cans of worms that we almost don't know where to begin. Leaving aside the question of how many prosecutors are waiting in the wings to indict Trump once he leaves office — and forgetting about what a cesspool of deep doodoo that would leave the GOP to wallow in (a delicious topic worth revisiting) — the one thing that gives us pause is the knowledge that by not running again, Benedict Donald would preemptively turn off the spigot of money he's been enjoying since he monetized the Presidency. We can't see him willingly walking away from that.

So we'll go with a theory proffered by another pundit we know: Donald Trump will lose in November, and God knows what he'll do during the transition. But he won't be at the White House on the morning of January 20, standing on the North Portico with Moose & Squirrel, waiting for the Bidens to pull up for coffee. He'll have decamped to Mar-a-Lago on January 19. We cats HISS.