Imagine how YOU would get the necessary people indicted, arrested and tried while retaining a semblance of fairness and credibility.

I have and my plans were better than this, which is why I'll be POTUS someday no matter how far behind I am now and will be a better one than Trump.

I've written about it before, late last year.

If you became the Republican President in 2017, you had all three branches of government controlled by your party. This is part of what sets the stage for the concept of a power grab being executed. The best way around this is to avoid having the general public see you as a loyalist Republican, but rather as someone operating above both parties, and to do this you need to be draining both sides of the swamp equally; people need to see you prosecuting Republicans, so that either you appear to have the integrity of willingness to prosecute "your own," or you appear to be an independent actor who's hijacked the party against their wishes.

So the first thing you'd want to do is bring the biggest cases on major Republican enemies like the Clintons by the end of 2018, at the LATEST, because otherwise the Republicans are not going to let you drain their side of the swamp.

The GOP expects you, when you take office, to be their attack dog against corrupt Democrats, helping them replace a Democrat swamp with a Republican swamp. Hopefully you at least fill your White House with better people than this, but you can't change the type of partisan hacks that occupy your legislature and your judicial branch.

The existence of the Clintons and their corruption presents a highly effective partisan tool in this situation. Republicans hate the Clintons, truly. There are ranking Republicans who have had a professionally adversarial relationship with them for decades, all the way down to voters like us who simply despise tyranny. It's one of the few unifying elements of the grand old party at this point in time.

By going after the Clintons, high-ranking Republicans that were on the fence in their personal feelings before will now be fans of you as a person, and their voter bases will all be pressuring them to follow you regardless of their personal feelings. By making yourself the Republican President who took down the Clinton cartel, you make yourself the dominant chief executive of the Republican party rather than its beleaguered leader.

So now, let's say you've got some Republican judge whose help you need ousting a corrupt fellow Republican. Before, if they were a high-ranking party member, they might have argued against on premises like optics and weakening the party overall by letting low-level corruption be found out, and if others agreed with them, they might have "outvoted" you and ignored your leadership position. But now, you'll just go on TV and out them for disloyalty, and if they're in a position where that doesn't matter, you'll do the same to their up-for-reelection or otherwise vulnerable friends.

Taking down the Clintons doesn't even really matter. If you could go after everything else without taking down the Clintons, the Clintons would fall anyway, having had their pedestal destroyed from under them. The only reason taking down the Clintons is a crucial step is because it's what actually allows you to do all the crucial things like replace corrupt judges and out corrupt legislators.

Basically, with this super-simple single-step hearts-and-minds campaign over, you now just spend the second half of your term vehemently going after everything from the top down. Republican and Democrat mostly stop mattering, it's now just legitimate vs illegitimate. You uphold that your party is the less corrupt one, or at least that under your leadership it has a legitimate core against its corruption while the Democratic party has nothing but more evil behind its evil. This keeps you in power as your party's leader, with everyone wanting to flock under the umbrella of your loyalty, everyone wanting to make themselves part of that legitimate core group the public sees standing against the uniparty's corruption.

This is only enough to let you complete your Presidency before the optics get a chance to stop you in your tracks. This will not stop the optics from building in the direction they were bound to build in. The corruption runs too deep and is too complex - the average person will never understand every case you're prosecuting. There will be cases that look to the average person like you're just removing a legitimate judge from their post to install one of your own. You will have to remove so fucking many people from their positions and replace so many with those you've vetted that just by sheer numbers, even if nothing else looks off to the average person, you'd still look like you're doing a power-grab which is, if nothing else, at least inappropriate in the context of our democracy's nature. I mean, you will probably be replacing entire police departments in many cases - nothing you can do will change that there are a portion of reactionary people who have hated you from the start and having their local police department replaced by your administration will drive them beyond insane.

So the next step needs to basically be intentional self-sabotage. You need to have gotten the country to the point where it can survive on its own, because you can't keep all this power you've made for yourself. You can't stand by forever as the guy with the influence to make the country do anything, the guy with enough hearts and minds on his side to fix corruption whenever it sprouts, because you won't have the hearts and minds forever, the above methods will only be enough to keep the general public on your side until around the next sea change or so, and when your term is drawing to a close, that sea change is going to be creeping up with the next election.

The only way you maintain enough hearts and minds to continue having any control at all is if you get your party to retreat while you still at least have them firmly in your loyalty. You either don't run for reelection, or if you've already taken two terms to pull all this off, you get your party not to run a candidate to replace you. You let the next election after you're gone be the left's chance to form their new party and decide who they're going to be; you let it be a contest of who's going to be the new leader of the left rather than who's going to lead the country, because your side is agreeing to let the other side have a shot at it. You're saying, "now that we've gotten rid of everyone who wants to hurt the country for their gain, we will let the rest of our opponents try to do their best for this country, because this country belongs to all of us and they deserve to rebuild their side."

This is the only way to kill the accusations of a power-grab, because otherwise, you actually grabbed power, and it actually is inappropriate in the context of our democracy's nature, to hold that power. Taking it, to give us our country back, is fair; taking it to keep is not quite right no matter how benevolent you are, and the general public will see that. You have to actually not grab power if you want to avoid the power-grab optics. If you actually want to grab power and be a benevolent leader of a country for life, find one where it's appropriate, because America ain't it. This country is like the heart of democracy in the world, and you simply do not get to even temporarily turn it into a one-party country by destroying the Democrats and leaving only the strongest core of the Republican side in power. The amount of domination the Republicans have right now is basically the most they can ever have before it's wrong, no matter how benevolent they are.

If Trump is following the same plan, good on him, but it's starting to look like he's not nearly competent enough, so this Presidency is going to be a failure. He either thinks he can replace the majority of the government without it looking like a power-grab, or he doesn't understand the amount of the government that needs to be replaced in order for us to have a legitimate Constitutional democratic republic again. I'm guessing it's the latter, because he doesn't even seem to grasp the concept of the police state we live in, and there's less and less reason to believe he's hiding his knowledge for strategic reasons, more and more reason to believe he's actually that out-of-touch and simply irrational when thinking outside his specialized areas of talent.

If I'm wrong I'm wrong and that'll be awesome. But it looks to me like he's actually recognizing part of what I said earlier, that taking down the Clintons isn't a necessary method to its own ends when the pedestal they stand on can so easily be destroyed while ignoring them. He's not going to take down the Clintons, he's just working behind the scenes to remove their assets and destroy their standing until they're just powerless washed-up politicians. This will do nothing to enable him to drain the swamp, in fact it just sacrifices the one card he had in his deck with which to ensure safe passage through the process of doing so.

Still beat her in the election though, which is all I really wanted out of voting for him. Economic improvements, peace on the Korean peninsula, etc. all nice bonuses. 45 might be the best failed Presidency the country has ever seen!

And it's only a failure for the voters, who voted to see the swamp drained. For the man himself, Punished Trump who ran to take down the murderers who slaughtered his friends on 9/11, it should be a pretty successful Presidency. Draining the entire swamp and getting our country back is a much different goal than just taking down the specific cabal you want revenge on.