Just resign, President Trump. Just resign.
You can claim you are going out on top. Every showman knows that’s the way to leave the stage.
Your exit message (whether true or not) is that you have accomplished more in 16 months than anybody else could have dreamed of, that you will leave America already great again, that you will leave a superlative team in place to run the show from here on — and that by leaving office now, you free yourself to attack all the “fake news” outlets and the deep state without it looking like you are doing it to save your own skin, but only for the benefit of the country.
Mr. Magnanimous, that’s you.
In stepping down, you would effectively cut the legs out from under special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation by making it look (if it continues) even more a Javert-like persecution. You would save your family from the constant nastiness of the Washington press corps. And when the economy takes a hit sometime in the next few years (as it surely will), or North Korea does something to renege on whatever deal emerges (as certainly will happen), or China overruns Taiwan while Russia annexes Transnistria, well, nobody will be able to lay blame on you.
It will all be your successor’s fault! It will be President Pence, not you, dealing with the fallout, while you and your pal Putin can be frolicking at your new Black Sea dacha.
Here are the super-duper-awesome successes for which you would (rightly or wrongly) claim credit: the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years and the second-lowest in 50 years; continuing low inflation and interest rates (if you stay any longer, you’ll be blamed for both going up, because they will, like rockets); a (temporarily) narrowing trade deficit; and a ton of new business investment.
Also, you can say you left only after solving the North Korean conundrum that nobody else has been able to solve for 70 years (while leaving the actual, pesky matter of implementation and verification to others); that you signed the bill to rebuild the U.S. armed forces; and that you crushed the Islamic State’s stronghold in Iraq and left it (supposedly) on the run in Syria. (Never mind that ISIS already was all but defeated in Mosul and retreating everywhere before you ever took office.)
Before you were elected, you would say, America was “barely alive.” But now you’ll say that everywhere anyone looks, America is better than she was before — better, stronger, faster. All it took to make it happen was 16 months’ attention from the six-billion-dollar man!
And when you exit, you can say (entirely honestly) that you have left in place the A-Team. Neil Gorsuch at the Supreme Court, James Mattis at Defense, Mike Pompeo at State, Nikki Haley at the U.N., Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, John Bolton as national security adviser, Jeff Sessions at Justice, Rick Perry at Energy, Elaine Chao at Transportation, and Betsy DeVos (who has gotten a bum rap) at Education, along with chief of staff John Kelly (if he stays), together form a constellation of savvy, competent, wise, conservative stars.
This is a team that can carry on with aplomb. And, to explain why so many of us hope you’ll leave, they can do so while sparing the country the tawdry soap opera that seems (for such unfair reasons, you’ll say) to follow you wherever you go. The national news won’t be about porn actresses or golden showers or the “very fine people” marching with white supremacists, nor about Mexican judges or Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad killing JFK or the lack of heroism of POWs, and certainly not about the manifest lies and bizarre self-contradictions that emanate a half-dozen times a day from your mouth.
Without your soap opera, there will be time and space for a president actually to make a sustained, effective argument for fixing healthcare policy, to cap the domestic spending eruption you just helped foist upon us, to bravely reform entitlement programs before they send the whole country to the poor house, and to push through Congress lasting legislation to replace a lot of the salutary, but easily reversible, executive orders you have signed.
You’re the Great Disruptor, and you’ve successfully shaken up the system and started draining the swamp. Now it’s time to let the excellent project managers (see “constellation” above) do the job of rebuilding and consolidating, while you leave Stormy seas behind.
Just resign, President Trump. Just resign.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic, a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
