Frank Bruni says trump has already resigned. He is giving up on the presidency. He is a shell. Bruni recites the usual litany of Trump failings and wrongs. Here is his New York Times op-ed and the 3000 plus comments it garnered.
The presidency is not vacant
The establishment whooped when Bannon left because it was assumed this was yet another of the signs that Trump will be somehow acceptable.
Bruni does not believe Trump is acceptable but he believes he is over, done, finished, Trump's end is near but it is not yet. The nation's ills are going to be corrected. But it will not happen overnight. In other words, there is a timeline. It can only be surmised because no one knows what is coming.
Ignoring what is happening
Most reporting gets it wrong by ignoring what is knowable. We know for example that Grand Juries are working on matters relating to Trump -- specifically the doings of his son Donald, Jr., Jared Kushner, and several others whose names are well known. The media know this too but they write on a daily basis and if nothing leaks out of the grand jury story, well go figure.
But what happens when most grand juries complete their labors? They issue indictments. That requires the presumption that a crime has been committed. It presumes a trial.
The dictator scenario
In addition to grand juries, a scary edifice has been built under our noses. The edifice is a dictatorship. Trump has taken steps needed to ensure that he has the same privileges that Putin, Duterte, Erdogan and Viktor Orbán have. These men, elected under processes as suspect as those which put Trump in power, are all effectively above the law. They are untouchable,
Trump is halfway there
With apparently little effort, Trump has crushed the GOP even as the media grasps at straws to show Trump's failure to single out Nazi behavior warrant's his removal.
When all threat of impeachment is absent, Trump will be almost all the way there.
Mueller holds the key
The key is timing and Mueller knows that. We are entrusting him with the most delicate game of the century. Time and the weight of the indictments are what matters. We know that Trump is far from finished. Bruni is dreaming, If the eventual verdict is that Trump's removal was easy, it will be because the weight of evidence was too heavy for Trump to catch and manipulate.
The time is short.
We are not looking at years. We are down to months. We are down to ten weeks. I believe that within that frame it is possible that indictments will emerge. Certainly, speculation about a Mueller firing will emerge. Trump is not Losing at this point.