The “Desperado in Chief” wants — NEEDS!!! — a diversionary “national” emergency.

He says it’s about the border wall. He’s got everybody yapping about immigration and steel slats. He’s torturing and killing innocent children in concentration camps at the border for the private profit of the incarceration corporations … and to act out his own primal fantasies as an absolute dictator.

But really, he couldn’t care less.

In fact, what this is obviously all about is the four walls he doesn’t want to look at from the inside of a jail cell for the rest of his unnatural life.

Those walls have been closing in on him for a long time. But the pace is mightily accelerating.

His indicted (and convicted) co-conspirator Paul Manafort has just had his plea deal canceled because he got caught lying (again!) to the federal courts. The consequence: that former look-how-incredibly-rich-I-am ex-millionaire may spend the rest of his orange-clad life in prison.

Manafort is no doubt counting on a pardon from the Oval Office. But Trump doesn’t seem to have the oomph necessary to face the outcry that would arise if he freed his former buddy.

It’s also possible Trump has come to understand that Manafort can still be tried (and convicted) in a state court. New York comes to mind.

Because of that states’-rights thing in the Constitution that Republicans all love so well when it comes to civil rights laws (but not legal pot or environmental protections), Trump’s pardons have no weight outside the federal courts.

This annoying lack of an absolute central dictatorship (however temporary) also applies to what state prosecutors could do to Trump’s children, son-in-law Jared Kushner, devoted apostle Roger Stone, and many many more from The Donald’s inner inner circle.

It’s become an even more inconvenient truth that, because the Democrats now control the US House, legal eagles like Jerome Nadler (D-NY) and “Little” Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) seem bit-chompingly ready to roll out the big guns. Incriminating unshredded documents like tax returns, phone records, feloniously denied taped conversations, canceled checks from the illegally prolonged Moscow Trump Tower negotiations, and much more are poised to become very very public.

Felony-worthy revelations from the unpardoned, soon-to-be-imprisoned Michael Cohen also lurk in the wings.

And then, of course, there are those thirty years of ceaseless multi-billion-dollar money launderings he did for the Russians. Those ill-gotten roubles are what swept The Donald through maybe six bankruptcies and $4 billion in debt.

As documented by David Cay Johnston, Craig Unger, and others, Trump Tower has long been a dormitory for the billionaire Putin-loving thugs and thieves that have kept The Donald afloat all these years. Some of their minions are already in custody here. Their bilingual Congressional testimony would be devastating, to say the least.

Overall, it seems that much of Robert Mueller’s dreaded “report” has in fact already been released in the form of multiple indictments and convictions. Taken as a unit, the encyclopedic litany of the Crimes of the Donald (so far) could certainly comprise an Oscar-winning script for one of Congress’s Greatest Shows on Earth.

This above all is what Trump is desperate to avoid. He is dying to keep the government shut. He needs to keep us talking about unbuilt walls and dying children.

He needs, above all, to keep those committees from convening.

He needs to keep everybody yelling about something — ANYTHING — else.

He MUST divert our eyes from the Prize: his inevitable departure from the Oval Office – that most sacred, holy, liberating, orange-on-orange perp walk to those big, beautiful walls inside the nearest federal prison.