If you thought Donald Trump was wild before, just wait

When President Bill Clinton was acquitted by the Senate following an impeachment trial in 1999, he apologized to the American public for his conduct. When President Donald Trump is almost assuredly acquitted on Wednesday in his own impeachment trial, he will take a victory lap.

As CNN’s Jeremy Diamond has reported, Trump is expected to claim the lack of votes in the Senate for his removal as a vindication of what he has been saying all along: That the entire Ukraine story is an attempt by partisan Democrats to overturn the 2016 election and unduly influence this November’s race as well.

“I don’t see the President making a big statement one way or another that would indicate anything different than what he’s been saying for many months,” one Republican close to Trump told Diamond.

Peter Baker made a similar point in The New York Times, writing:

“Now Mr. Trump, who has said that the Constitution ‘allows me to do whatever I want’ and pushed so many boundaries that curtailed past presidents, has little reason to fear the legislative branch nor any inclination to reach out in conciliation.”

As did Axios’ Jonathan Swan:

“Everything we’ve heard from Trump’s aides over the last month suggests he will give less and less credence to voices urging caution….Per a senior White House official, Trump feels every major gamble he’s taken has succeeded despite advisers who were Chicken Littles.”

In short: If you thought the first three years of Trump’s presidency was as far as he was willing to stretch norms of what a leader can say or do, well, buckle up.

While the average person might see the last few months — in which a series of revelations have come to light that make clear that Trump acted inappropriately in asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter — as a moment in which the President might reflect on how he behaved and, if not apologize, then consider changing his conduct, Trump sees none of that.

He has long viewed himself as a victim of an unfair system, biased against him for, well, whatever reason makes the most sense to him at the moment. Usually his ire fell on snobs and “elites.”

Trump sees his victory in 2016 as the ultimate validation of the idea that he was, in fact, smarter and just plain better than all of the people who had said he couldn’t break into Manhattan real estate or be a TV star or get elected president. At a campaign rally in North Dakota during the 2018 midterms, Trump boiled down his life’s anti-elite passion to just a few sentences:

“I meet these people they call them ‘the elite.’ These people. I look at them, I say, ‘That’s elite?’ We got more money, we got more brains, we got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are, and they say they’re elite? We’re the elite. You’re the elite. We’re the elite.”

“So I said the other day, let’s keep calling these people—and let’s face it, they’ve been stone-cold losers, the elite, the elite—so let them keep calling themselves the elite,” he continued. “But we’re going to call ourselves—and remember you are indeed, you work harder, but you are indeed smarter than them—let’s call ourselves from now on the super-elite. We’re the super-elite.”

It’s through that distorted lens that Trump views the impeachment proceedings. The “elites” — whether in the Democratic Party or the media or both — tried to get him because they swung and missed back in 2016. They couldn’t do it. And the reason they couldn’t is not because Republicans live in fear of crossing Trump (which they do!) but rather because he never did anything wrong. The July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect.” And Article Two of the Constitution allows him “to do whatever I want as President.”

Trump wasn’t saying that stuff because he wanted to spin the conversation around impeachment. He was saying it because he believes it. Wholeheartedly. And he believes this despite oodles of evidence that many Republican senators who will vote against his removal on Wednesday believe he acted inappropriately in regard to Ukraine.

In Trump’s mind then, what’s happened here is this: They tried to get him, and they failed. Which means not a) that he should be careful next time around but rather b) that his conduct was totally cool and that he was well within his rights and c) can and should do this stuff again. Because he is the President and they’re not. And they just can’t deal with that fact.

This conclusion is, obviously, deeply misguided. Republican senators, operating largely out of tribalism, justifying Trump’s conduct as perhaps inappropriate but not impeachable is not the same thing as giving him a blank check to operate however he sees fit going forward. We see that. Trump does not.

All of which makes it extremely likely that we ain’t seen nothing yet. Which, given what the past three years have looked like, is a very frightening prospect when it comes to accepted societal norms.