In Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, “Sleeper,” Woody plays, Miles Monroe, a nebbishy clarinet player who also runs a health food store in NYC’s Greenwich Village. Miles is cryogenically frozen after a failed, routine hospital procedure. “I knew it was too good to be true, I got a parking space right in front of the hospital,” he laments upon being awoken, 200 years in the future, by anti-government radicals in order to assist them in their attempt to overthrow their oppressive government which Woody declares “worse than California’s.” 

In one scene, the scientists who revive him present him with various artifacts from the 1970’s as there’s little information about that period. When shown a variety of photos, he says, in all seriousness:

“This was Josef Stalin. He was a communist, I was not too crazy about him, had a bad moustache, lot of bad habits. This is Bela Lugosi (A famous actor no doubt dressed in his “Dracula” costume) he was, he was the mayor of New York City for a while, you can see what it did to him there, you know. This is, uhm, this is, uh, Charles DeGaulle (president of France), he, he was a very famous French chef, had his own television show, showed you how to make souffles and omelets and everything.That’s a photograph of Norman Mailer. He was a very great writer. He donated his ego to the Harvard medical school for study.”  The scene is wrapped up when they then show him a video of Howard Cosell rambling on about Muhammed Ali and is it the end of his boxing career (remember Howard Cosell?) and one of the scientists says: “We weren’t sure at first what to make of this, but we developed a theory: we feel that when people committed great crimes against the state, they were forced to watch this.” Woody replies: “Yes. That’s exactly what that was.” 

Prior to this, the scientist show him a black and white video of Richard Nixon, circa 1950’s, giving a speech. The scientist says: “Some of us have a theory that he might once have been a president, of the United States of America, but that he did something horrendous so that all records, everything was wiped out about him. There’s nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps nor money.” Woody: “Yes, he actually was president of the United States. But I know that whenever he left the White House, the Secret Service used to count the silverware.”  The last paragraph was my point, but I can’t resist sharing more from what is one of his best movies. 

I mention this because I feel certain that Trump is going down. Fast. I wrote back in February that I believed a Palace Coup by his Cabinet would oust him via the 25th Amendment. However, read this article from Slate by Dalia Lithwick in which she argues that his cabinet of millionaires and billionaires are happy to keep him as their useful stooge. Then, there’s the recent article by Ross Douthat the New York Times opinionator who is usually a reliable water carrier for Republicans, arguing that he will probably be deposed via the 25th Amendment. This article is a major break from his usual apologetics and dissembling. 

Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal” wrote today that Trump will simply resign and as always turn a defeat into victory by merely declaring the defeat, a victory. 

I don’t know how this is going to end, but it will end and it will end sooner rather then later. And one hundred, two hundred years from now, people at that time will say, “he did something horrendous so that all records, everything was wiped out about him.”