My prediction that it’d be about now we’d begin to see the Berlusconi-antics of the Trump kleptocracy reach full boil is holding up pretty well. Maybe not exactly as I was thinking four months ago, but well enough to note the high rate of agitation.

The emotional power of this obscene family separation crisis down on the border — the latest in a long list of crises entirely self-created by Team Trump, especially his low-key Goebbels-like “advisor” Stephen Miller — has the dual effect of, A: Re-reassuring “the base”, a.k.a. The Goobers, that Trump is still everything they and their parents before them have dreamed of in a strong white leader, and B: Deflecting attention from the Robert Mueller “witch hunt.”

And it’s working.

Trump’s polling numbers — deeply valued by a ratings-obsessed ego maniac — are rising. The Base and a smattering of traditional, tribal Republicans are firming up around his ankles, encouraged, as usual, by a guy who “keeps the promises he made”, which in this case is to keep out everybody who isn’t known by name at a Lake Charles, Louisiana Waffle House.

Naturally Trump is invigorated by this rise and solidifying of his numbers. Which explains his even more aggressive disregard for truth and decency.

I had calculated — and still do — that the indictment of Michael Cohen (or even more delicious, Jared Kushner) would be the trip wire that set off the full Trump IED. At that point he’d spiral into unfettered neo-Mussolini demagoguery and “hereby” order The Base to take up arms against, well, I don’t know who for sure, but any minority or liberal will do.

Cohen’s indictment remains inevitable and imminent, and there is zero doubt that Trump’s real lawyers, (not Rudy Giuliani), have warned him that both Mueller and the Southern District of New York have all the ingredients necessary or a slam dunk case of long-term fraud and corruption against both Cohen and him. Moreover, his flagrant and comically unsophisticated money laundering scams with Russian gangsters is more cheap grease for Mueller’s collusion probe.

Point being, Trump has no viable legal strategy. He never has. All he has is obstruction and politics. He can do whatever he can to delay and divert investigations and indictments. That’s it, lawyer-wise. But in the end he knows that everything will come down to how fervently (and perhaps even violently) The Base will support him in the face of all the revelations to come.

Because, as we see every day, even with this “children ripped from their mothers’ arms” episode, because The Base loves this there simply aren’t enough Republicans in Congress, or at the state level, brave enough to peep a word of disagreement. One step out of cadence with their Dear Orange Leader and they’ll be on the receiving end of a tweet telling Goober Nation they are a “stooge” and to “hereby” vote for the other guy.

You have to laugh at poor Ted Cruz, aka the Single Most Loathed Creature on The Hill, who has been forced by a credible opponent (Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke) to garp up a lip-service bill reversing Trump/Miller’s “not a policy” policy. Once this moment passes it’ll be fascinating, in a nauseating sort of way, to listen to Cruz back pedal and explain this gross disloyalty to the Goober Borg as an aberration. You know, some kind of Walter White-like fugue state.

But while 90% of self-proclaimed Republican voters, (i.e. 40% or less of the actual electorate), are still all in for Trump, the temperature of antipathy of voters outside The Goober Bubble for Trump (and Miller and Scott Pruitt and Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders and all the other White House gargoyles) is rising quickly.

It may be Trump’s improving poll numbers as much as this family separation story, but my sense is that garden variety “Trump haters” have lately moved beyond dismissal and disgust to actual hate. Put in vulgar terms that everyone can understand, the attitude today is, “This shit has gone on too long and far enough. These bastards not only have to be stopped, they have to be crushed.”

As an aside, it’ll be interesting to see how low-key, standard-issue, machine-bred Democrats like Tina Smith respond to this temperature spike among likely voters. The bet is Smith in particular is so genetically programmed for Mondale-era politesse she’ll leave the exploitation of visceral disgust/hate of Trumpism to Richard Painter.

Would you give that away?

As for a resolution to this latest immigration crisis, I can imagine Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen resigning, having thoroughly disgraced herself in front of everyone who doesn’t think of Mountain Dew and Coors Light as a formal cocktail. But I don’t see Trump accepting defeat on this issue in any shape or form, no matter how it plays out.

He doesn’t have to.

I suspect Miller is telling him The Base will accept any theory of the case he offers. Ever.

Even if the “zero tolerance” separation is reversed, if Trump wants to say his strategy worked, the Democrats caved, the wall has been built, illegal immigration (hell, all immigration) has stopped and all those vicious MS-13 toddlers have been sent off to some SuperMax lockdown, that fantasy will be accepted within The Goober Bubble. In there, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones will be reading from the same script, “revealing” how videos of kids in cages (or kids being returned to their parents) are in fact “crisis actors” in “doctored videos.”

I still have roughly a month left in my “late spring to mid-summer” window for a Pinatubo-like eruption of next-level craziness.

But the trend lines are looking good. I mean, “bad.”