When I asked Slate's Dahlia Lithwick to try to picture Donald Trump's last day in office, she couldn't do it.

I feel like, as is often the case in just horrific abusive relationships, I can't quite imagine yet that this gets fixed.

You don't want to get too optimistic.

I just feel as though once you give over to the reality that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani will do absolutely anything, break absolutely anything, burn absolutely anything to win this thing, it's hard to just seed the fear that there's some pathway to doing that.

Dahlia knows she's being irrational here.

She says she was actually more worried a few weeks back.

Now I think he's going to go and he's going to go clawing the carpet on his way out, kicking and screaming.

But go he will.

But I do think that there is this real question about, you know, does he take off for some

foreign land? Does he, you know, pardon himself on the way out?

In an administration that has broken so many rules, leaving office isn't as simple as packing up a few closets. Leaving the White House

makes the president much more vulnerable to prosecution, which up until now, he's managed to

avoid. You know how I think of inauguration day? I think of the day that Trump leaves office

as a sort of Harry Potter moment where he's had

this like magical protection for the last four years, this charm that's kept him unprosecutable.

And that's the day that that charm breaks. I think that's really true. And I think that

we're in this weird moment now where there's an awful lot of Democrats who feel as though this

doesn't end well unless somebody is marched off in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. Like there

needs to be a reckoning and there

needs to be consequences. Otherwise, we're just holding our breath until the Tom Cotton administration

crimes again. And I think there is another strand of this that says, not unreasonably,

more than 70 million people think that Donald Trump did nothing wrong. And if the Biden Justice Department

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