drplokta

 In his business career, Donald Trump made a practice, when he'd overreached, of declaring bankruptcy and leaving his business partners or lenders with the losses. He's overreached with his war against Iran, and doesn't seem to have a plan for dealing with the energy crisis caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

His followers are split, because a lot of them seemed to believe that he wouldn't start unwise new wars and feel they've been betrayed. They've missed the point of being a Trump follower: the required belief is that he's always right, and we have always been at war with Eurasia. Principles are just ways of drawing in the suckers. 

However, Trump doesn't appear to have a way out of this mess, having alienated NATO to the point when even Kemi Badenoch is calling his attacks "childish." However, there is one, using two of his classical business tactics: avoiding the blame, and the bad faith lawsuit. 

First, he resigns as president, unexpectedly. J D Vance succeeds to the presidency and promptly and pre-emptively pardons Trump. That does not give Trump immunity against international law charges of making aggressive war, but he probably doesn't want to leave the US much more in the future. 

Second, he staves off humiliation, in his own eyes and those of his followers, by announcing his candidacy for president in 2028. He's not eligible to do that under the US constitution, but there's a tiny loophole that a bad-faith lawsuit could be based on.

When a president dies, resigns or otherwise leaves office, it's quite important to the vice-president just when that happens. If a VP serves less than half of a president's term, his own eligibility to be elected president is not affected. If he serves more than half, he's considered to have done a term as president, and can only be elected once. Trump could claim that this is unfair to a president who resigned early in his second term, and sue to be allowed to stand again. The point of this would not be to win, but to be able to carry on denouncing the "corrupt and unpatriotic Supreme Court" and raising "campaign" funds from suckers.