New emails emerge of oval office confrontation three days before Jan. 6

[Tom Rinaldo]

12. I think Donpghue played it right with the threatened resignations

Trump is a pig headed pig but he actually isn't literally stupid on a feral level. He knew that it would not end well for him if he triggered off a mass exodus from the DOJ. He still had hopes of remaining President, but that would have required a number of State legislatures and a majority of State delegations to Congress to back his coup by rejecting Biden Electoral College delegates and replacing them with newly minted Trump delegates. The uproar that mass resignations from DOJ would have caused would have made Nixon's Saturday Night massacre seem like a total non event in comparison. I think that would have triggered off some defections from enough old line Republican Congress members to doom that scheme, which had very little margin for error at best. I figure at that point Trump thought he had a better chance of holding onto power via his mob stopping Biden's certification followed by his use of the Insurrection Act.