Bolding mine. So who told him what he’s up against? Putin? Trump surely couldn’t connect those dots. No fucking way. Who is telling him to take security clearance away?
He is truly a moron. This ‘man’ doesn’t know the difference between agent orange and napalm. And could not be corrected or swayed by Vietnam vets. This is a ‘man’ that would insist that his plumber use nails to connect pipes together, cause nails are strong.
Can anyone name any person in the public eye that is as clueless as trump is?
Agreed. I’m beginning to think the Manafort trial might end in a hung jury with a true believer Trumpest being the one vote against conviction on all counts.
If it’s one - and only one - Trumpist juror, maybe he caves on one or more of the charges. The power of group peer pressure and a foreman might compel a holdout to concede some ground.
But if there’s more than one…if we’re talking about one or two Trump Maga-bot diehards, and if in addition to that there are one or two more who might not be so diehard but are Trump “leaners” who are skeptical of some aspects of this trial, then we might have a problem on our hands.
I’m also wondering why there has been no apparent sequestration in this trial - like why not?
He’s a moron in many ways, but not when it comes to manipulating people and not when it comes to power.
Authoritarians are constantly challenging power, constantly testing and probing to see weaknesses in the systems that confine them.
What he knows is that the system is not going to break with simply firing one or two people; it’s increasingly dawning on him that if he fires one person, the next man up or the next woman up is going to be cut from the same cloth as the person he just tossed overboard. He fired Comey, and got McCabe. He fired them both and got Chris Wray. He fired Preet Bharara and he’s now stuck with prosecutors who are just as vigilant as Bharara was. He’s revoked Brennan’s security clearance and threatened to do the same with others, and he ended up getting even more fierce criticism from Gen. McRaven. And he knows that for every McRaven, for every Bharara, for every Comey, McCabe or Wray, there are many more behind them. Trump knows now that he’s in some deep shit.
But contrary to what we might wish to believe, this realization is also what is going to make him even more dangerous than he has ever been before. Trump is not going to back down or shy away; he will escalate to match the threat level he perceives himself facing. And moreover, he knows that he has an entire political party, many mega-donors, and 40% of voters standing firmly behind him. Even as the majority of people overall are repulsed by Trump, he knows that his opponents don’t necessarily stand united with each other, whereas he knows his legions of right wing extremism are bound by an increasingly toxic level of animosity and contempt toward democratic norms that underlie our politics and society.
In short, as the walls of justice begin to close in on him, he’s going to resort to behavior that is ever increasingly extreme and outrageous. And his supporters will defend him, because they realize that their worldview is in the minority as well and don’t trust normal democratic mechanisms to defend their vision of what they believe this country should be. Authoritarianism almost always begins with consent, and he’s getting it from about 40% of the people.
I don’t think Trump is intellectually developed enough to do something as sophisticated as “send messages.” I think he just lashes out. People piss him off, he hits back.
Sounds like McGahn is this series’s John Dean, and we have a new insult Dotard’s inner staff has bestowed upon him. “King Kong is a fucking moron” does have a nice ring to it…
Just hazarding a guess, but this might could mebbe possibly just a chance go slightly not well for our “president.”
He never could tell the difference between his own personal attorney and the White House Counsel. Probably said all kinds of self-incriminating things.
Kind of makes that Trump interview with Mueller superfluous.
The head-scratcher for me is: how does it come to pass that this aspect of the story is being revealed to the NYT now? Is McGahn about to get canned? Who is behind this revelation? The only thing I can be sure of is that it isn’t Mueller and co.
I wonder how it will be spun when it hits Fox: Disloyal WH Counsel Snitches to Mueller for Thirty Hours!
I think we’ve known the broad outlines of the story for some time. IOW, we knew McGahn had been extensively interviewed by Mueller’s team, at a time when the Trump “strategy” was to cooperate fully with the Mueller investigation as encouraged by the Dowd/Cobb team based on Trump’s representations that he, Trump, had done nothing wrong.
What’s new is that McGahn spilled every bean, believing that Trump was trying to make him, McGahn, take the hit for any obstruction charges. To McGahn’s credit, he did entreat Trump to claim executive privilege, but Dowd/Cobb prevailed and waived it. That got McGahn and his lawyer to wondering why Trump was being so cooperative. They concluded that Trump was engineering a “fall guy” attack on McGahn.
Dowd claims in the article that Mueller’s team “snookered” Trump. I think Mueller’s team snookered Dowd/Cobb. But of course, if you have an innocent client, your best strategy is to cooperate.
Trump probably wants to fire McGahn in the worst way. But McGahn has powerful support from Republicans in Congress and so is likely safe at least until after Kavanaugh’s confirmation process.
As usual, the Times story is well sourced. My understanding is that twelve sources supported the contentions made in the article. I am sure none of them came from the Mueller team, so probably White House sources familiar with the situation provided the confirmation.
This. When he started getting tangled up with the Russian mob 30 years ago, perhaps he kinda knew what was going on. Though I think that even at that time he thought he was pulling the strings.
Now, with nothing but pudding between his ears, he just gets angry and lashes out. I doubt very much he knows anything about security clearances other than it’s something he can take away. SOMEONE put that idea in what is left of his brain.
But a worse way than that would be to tie McGahn to a wheelchair and make him stay up all night watching footage of Trump at his rallies, then as dawn approaches, wheel McGahn up to the Presidential bedroom so he could watch Trump rage-tweet while on the can, then make McGahn watch Trump take his morning shower. Then fire him.
And by take his morning shower, I assume you mean make his morning shower… which, if he is true to form, would be a golden one all over McGahn. Then fire him.
Probably going to be a little awkward at Monday morning meetings going forward.
Yeah. It was Dowd’s specific job to make sure that his client, Trump, wasn’t being snookered. But it all started with Trump snookering Dowd into believing that Donald was an innocent bystander.
Also, this part here -
There is no way that Dowd is any position to know how the White House documents fit into Mueller’s many other documents. Dowd is blowing smoke up his own ass if he thinks truly thinks that Mueller has mentally cleared Donald in this investigation.
Interesting perspective. I’m convinced (I’m easy that way)
One question though; if McGahn’s and Trump’s usefulness to the GOP is their court stacking willingness/ability, then why is Pence not just as useful. What makes Trump, who seems to be somewhat of a liability, unique or what makes Pence undesirable?
