we do need to look back to Nixon's presidency and resignation to get a sense of how it might play out.
(This is a bit long, but bear with me.)
Nixon kept on rolling along, stonewalling everything and everybody connected to the Watergate thing for quite a long time. And for a long time the Washington Post was the ONLY paper in the country pursuing this, to the point where most people thought the Post was beating a dead horse and should give up already. I no longer recall (although I was an adult then, living in the DC area, and paying pretty good attention to all this) just what triggered the Watergate hearings, but they were the game-changer. I believe all three networks covered them, and back in that primitive era before cable, there was nothing else to watch on television.
Then came the revelation about the Oval Office taping system. Once that was known, Nixon's time in office was near its end. Then, of course, Nixon and his cronies tried to refuse to give up the tapes, and even tried to erase one crucial portion, which became the Smoking Gun. It's also somewhat forgotten that in March of 1974 Nixon was named as an unindicted co-conspirator when seven of his aides were indicted in the Watergate conspiracy.
It was not until early August of that year, when Republican leaders came to Nixon and told him that he would be impeached an removed for office that he finally got it, and he resigned office.
Now turn our attention to Trump and all he's done so far. Right now Republicans still hold a firm majority in the House and Senate, and at present they are not about to consider removing him from office. It appears that they think that they can contain his worst damage, while he brings about the things they have wet dreams about, such as the wall, such as restricting or banning all Muslim immigration and the entry of any refugees, no matter where they are from (unless they are persecuted Christians). They want huge tax cuts for the rich. They want what they see as business destroying regulations killed. They don't give a flying fuck if poor people don't have health care, if old people lose their pensions and social security. And so they'll cheerfully do their best to implement all sorts of horrors on the rest of us.
Meanwhile, the courts are standing firm against Trump on the Muslim ban, and is he pissed! I believe other law-suits about his other executive orders have also been filed, and I suspect he'll lose on most of them.
But he'll hang firm as long as possible. To think that he never really wanted to be President is completely wrong, in my view. He always thought, How hard could it be? He always figured it would be a bit like starting construction on a new building or golf course somewhere in the world, and he'd do a big photo op and others would do all the hard work. He still doesn't understand how much responsibility a President really has, and to what extent this is a full time job. More than full time.
I see a couple of possible scenarios for him to leave office more or less voluntarily:
* At some point he simply decides it's not worth it, and manufactures some sort of excuse to resign (spend more time with Barron).
* He so humiliates himself and the country by doing something totally inappropriate on a state visit (can you see him trying to do the power hand-shake with Angela Merkel or the Queen of England?) and resigns in a huff, never quite understanding that what he did was sot totally wrong.
*He pushes us to the very edge of war, possibly even a nuclear war, and responsible Republicans make it clear he needs to resign for the good of the country.
Actually, that last one may impel Republicans to invoke the 25th Amendment. Either way he'd be gone.
You are absolutely right that however his administration plays out, he will always blame others for whatever goes wrong, and never take a scintilla of responsibility.
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