Your bag is empty.
The recent depth of desperation coming from the White House is alarming—even from an administration that has been desperate since the first day, when we were told President Donald J. Trump had the largest inaugural crowds in history.
Trump excels at desperation. He is desperate to make us believe he’s the greatest president since George Washington. He’s desperate to denigrate former president Barack Obama. He’s desperate to pillage the treasury for his own gain. He’s desperate to put down anyone who opposes him. He’s desperate to convince everyone he hasn’t committed the egregious acts he confesses to in a variety of public settings. He’s desperate to prove his relevance.
But more than anything, he’s desperate for acceptance. The harder he tries, the more he fails. His desperation is as thick as smoke from a Texas hill country barbecue and it smells as bad as a landfill of burning corpses.
After admitting it was too early to congratulate himself, he did so anyway.
This week, for the first time in months Donald Trump didn’t answer questions as he left the Oval Office. He walked out to the South Lawn Wednesday before 175 members of the White House Press Corps, made a brief statement and then walked away.
An hour earlier Trump announced before the press pool he’d made a historic deal to stop the Turks from killing Kurds. After admitting it was too early to congratulate himself, he did so anyway. Then he told us why it was all Obama’s fault, though Trump also claimed responsibility for the military action that led to the death of our allies, and at the same time claimed responsibility for stopping it. He said a “short-term outburst” of violence was needed to get a “permanent ceasefire” which he also admitted may not be permanent at all.
That type of doublethink demanded a few questions. The first that came to my mind was “Didn’t you just try to put out a fire you started?” Many still think he pulled troops out of key points in Syria to deflect from the ongoing impeachment inquiry. But Trump didn’t answer my question. As he walked five feet from me he merely sneered.
He was having none of it. Congressional testimony by Ambassador Bill Taylor on Tuesday about events in Ukraine had shaken and stirred Trump. Taylor, who served there, said he became concerned in August, shortly after Secretary Mike Pompeo brought him in to clean up diplomatic problems in the region.
“I became increasingly concerned that our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular, informal channel of U.S. policy-making and by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons,” Taylor said.
According to the ambassador, Rudy Giuliani led a shadow diplomatic effort—a move former national security advisor John Bolton described as a “drug deal.”
“What does that tell you?” CNN political analyst Michael Zeldin said. “It tells you that something is going on illegally and there’s a quid pro quo effort.”
Either administration lawyers don’t want anyone admitting anything or GOP politicians know Trump is going to get impeached but want to try and protect him from removal.
Astute investigators note that an actual “quid pro quo” deal isn’t needed to show that Trump abused his presidential power. Those accusations would have weight in a criminal trial; Trump isn’t facing that yet.
But things are falling apart fast.
At the end of last week, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney stepped into the Brady Briefing room and said what everyone long suspected: Trump threatened to withhold aide to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian president took up an investigation against Trump’s political rival Joe Biden. This is how politics is played in 2019, Mulvaney told us. “Get over it.”
Wags in D.C. have speculated Mulvaney’s admission in the briefing room was a calculated risk that may have been taken with or without Trump’s knowledge.
There are two schools of thought: Either administration lawyers don’t want anyone admitting anything, or GOP politicians know Trump is going to get impeached but want to try and protect him from removal. According to that reasoning, Mulvaney punted and decided to fall back to another line of defense: This is just politics. No harm. No foul. Move along. Nothing to see. At least the GOP faithful can defend that. The problem is that it’s not an either/or. These are two concurrent thoughts.
Using a despicable image to describe a legal investigation is part of the strategy of gaslighting that highlights Trump’s only line of defense.
By Monday Trump was still trying to deflect the mounting evidence against him and decided to compare the impeachment inquiry to a “lynching.” That got everyone’s attention.
Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley tried to defend Trump’s actions to a fired-up gaggle of reporters on the North Lawn driveway. No fewer than two dozen of us tried to question Gidley, whose best defense of Trump was “He has used many words.” Peter Alexander from NBC got to him first, but it was a free-for-all from which Gidley could not recover. I couldn’t even get him to admit “lynching” was a poor choice of words.
Trump? He couldn’t care less. Using a despicable image to describe a legal investigation is part of the strategy of gaslighting that highlights Trump’s only line of defense.
Like the New York sewer rat he is, Trump is cornered and he’s fighting nasty. He can’t argue the facts: He has released a so-called transcript of a call he made to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky clearly showing Trump tried to make a deal. He doubled down on the South Lawn about a month ago during a departure and encouraged China to help him out investigating political rival Joe Biden.
Trump also can’t argue the law. The law says he can be investigated.
Trump faces far worse as president: embarrassment and a repudiation of his stature. His insecurity cannot handle that.
He’s left pounding his fist on the desk and attacking the prosecutors and the process. His claims of a witch hunt continue. He issued a statement Tuesday night through Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham with no explanation as to why it was released or what it was specifically addressing.
“President Trump has done nothing wrong,” the statement began. “This is a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution. There was no quid pro quo. Today was just more triple hearsay and selective leaks from the Democrats’ politically-motivated, closed door, secretive meetings.”
The statement was Nixonesque. “I’m not a crook,” wasn’t stated but was definitely implied.
Grisham most likely issued it in response to ambassador Taylor’s testimony that day in Congress. But the casual observer would never know it: The White House never prefaced the statement. The lack of clarity is part of the chaos of the administration. As contentious as it got during the Clinton scandals and impeachment, it was never like this. Clinton could compartmentalize his fight with Congress while still doing his job as president. Trump cannot.
He drummed up his little frat boy minions, Reps Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz, to storm a secure room in the Capitol, dozens more in tow, and break up a committee meeting with witnesses being interviewed as part of the impeachment inquiry. Gaetz and his Omega fraternity brothers ordered pizza and delayed hearings by five hours because they claimed there was no transparency in the process and that the GOP had no access to the secret investigation the Democrats were conducting.
Jordan also claimed only Adam Schiff knows who the whistleblower is and that had to end. The truth is no member of Congress knows who any of the whistleblowers are. Further, there are GOP members on the committees involved in the impeachment inquiry. More than a quarter of those who broke into a secure room to protest the secrecy of the hearings had a right to be there and question witnesses.
All Trump has left to him is disruption. The facts aren’t with him. The law isn’t with him. If he were a private citizen he’d face criminal charges. But he faces far worse as president: embarrassment and a repudiation of his stature. His insecurity cannot handle that. His need for fealty and acceptance will balk at any rebuke.
The realization of his plight drove him into that uncomfortable, sneering silence before the press corps Wednesday. That silence spoke volumes. Trump loves the limelight. He basks in the glory of talking to the press. It’s a powerful narcotic to a man who is obsessed with being needed and wanted. All of those people hanging on his every word, recording them, playing them back, saying his name, showing his picture—all of that makes Trump giddy. That’s why he’s doing so many rallies. He needs the fix.
Giving up on the chance to be heard even for a moment must crush the man, and that brings us back to the smell of desperation.
Trump’s got absolutely nothing. He can’t answer questions about Syria: We know the facts too well. And he doesn’t want to talk about the Russian bear in the room that got over on him. He can’t answer questions about Ukraine: He already admitted his guilt in the matter. He can’t even talk about the future, since his own political future is in question. All he can do is fume in silence as he walks past the camera.
What comes next? With Trump all the options are on the table.