If Trump Resigns, Only One Man Can Take His Place

Imagining the hard-to-imagine post-Trump future

Photo: Rick Wilking/Pool/Getty

The Ukraine scandal is metastasizing so quickly that it’s impossible to have a clear sense of where it’s heading.

But there is one potential outcome that we need to take a lot more seriously than we did even a week ago — Trump’s forced resignation at the hands of Mitch McConnell. The chaos that would flow from that outcome would have profound — and possibly hilarious — implications for the future of democracy and the Republican Party.

To begin with, let’s stipulate the most likely facts around a forced Trump resignation (inshallah and knock on wood):

1. An explosive piece of documentary evidence comes to light directly tying Trump to criminality — audio of a phone call, surreptitious video, a hand-written note, etc. — that finally tips the scales so that the GOP can only save itself by jettisoning him.
2. The evidence implicates Trump so directly that even he realizes he can’t run for the 2020 GOP nomination or continue to govern, and accepts pressure to step down.
3. That evidence becomes public before the end of January, when McConnell and big-money donors still think they have time to pick up the pieces before the election. Any time after that, and the GOP has…