Submitted for your consideration

Here's a Rod Serling Twilight Zone, "submitted for your consideration" interlude. I've been reading a book about Russian politics. The author says that understanding Russian politics isn't hard, as long as you drop the assumption that there are some things, just unthinkable things, that the government would never do. I don't know about Russia, but I do know about prosecutors and Trump and American politics. And I think that it is wrong to assume that Trump wouldn't dare to fire independent counsel Robert Mueller and pardon everybody who committed crimes on his behalf, because that would be unthinkable, authoritarian, tin-pot dictator, banana republic behavior. He would. And it is equally wrong to think that the Republicans in both houses of Congress wouldn't defend him for doing it. Because they would. And it is also wrong to think that the corporate media would drop their vapid, nonsensical, "both sides are equally extreme" coverage if/when this happens, because they would normalize it just like they normalized Trump's firing of the FBI director.
Now, maybe Trump won't set this whole chain in motion by firing Mueller. I hope he doesn't. But as the Magic 8 Ball says, "Signs point to yes." Because Mueller has quickly put together a Prosecution Death Star that is going to take about a year to get charged up, and when Mueller pushes the "fire" button, there will be more pieces of Trump floating in space than there were of Alderan, and none will be bigger than a grain of sand. By now, Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, and maybe others, may have worked out deals with Mueller. Trump knows this, and it is obvious that he has absolutely no respect for the law, which for him is just another hostile power that he has to dominate. He may figure that he would rather terminate the prosecution and weather the firestorm than endure what will happen if he doesn't.
Because remember: just because we don't know all the facts about what he did, it doesn't mean that he doesn't know all the facts about what he did.