Republican political strategist Rick Wilson provides a clear picture of the Donald in the New York Daily News.
Maintaining the Trump illusion requires an endless suspension of disbelief; denying facts, logic, reason, the law and the utterly evident cluster-you-know-what that this administration represents. The pinnacle of that illusion-at-all-costs philosophy came after the revelation that an FBI informant followed up on leads that Trump campaign foreign policy aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos had been playing footsie with the Russians.
On Fox News, talk radio and in the Trump-right online media armies, the innocent Trump campaign was the victim of FBI spying against them, ordered by notorious Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent Barack Obama, evil sorceress Hillary Clinton and their army of Deep State apparatchiks.
For the FBI actions Trump calls Spygate to be a real concern, it would require malice. Instead, we’ve seen justification after justification for a robust counterintelligence response to Russian malfeasance. Drawn to the Trump campaign like flies to the biggest manure pile in the universe, the FBI wasn’t after him, but rather — quite properly — the Russians who sought to (and may have succeeded) in subverting American democracy and corrupting our elections.
There’s a line in the 1990s film “Grosse Point Blank” where John Cusack’s assassin character defends his line of work. He says, “If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there.”
It couldn’t have been that an FBI counterintelligence investigation against the Russians kept finding lead after lead headed straight back to Trump associates, family members, friends, business partners and his senior campaign officials, could it? It couldn’t have been because Trump advisers were boasting they had the Russian goods on Hillary Clinton, that his sons were taking meetings in Trump Tower with platoons of Russians tied to Vladimir Putin, or that his attorney Michael Cohen was signing letters of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, right? And there’s no way it was the opinion of every American intelligence agency that the Russians were all in with a program of information warfare in support of Donald Trump. No way? Way.
No, Trump fans, it’s not 87-dimensional chess. There’s no secret plan, no hidden strategy. Trump is a man who sees everything through the dumb lens of reality television, New York tabloid spritzing, professional wrestling kayfabe and an utterly misplaced belief that he is a master negotiator.
He’s a man of notably grotesque ignorance who refuses to read even the crayon picture-book version of the President’s Daily Brief, and who is contemptuous of both the intelligence community and American diplomats.
His North Korean reaction was pure emotion, all impulse and no judgment. Just like his responses to Cohen’s new perils, the looming Mueller investigation, the failures of his superstar legal team to close down the Russia probe, his desire to corrupt and suborn the Justice Department and the intelligence community to protect him from the special counsel are all signs of his contempt for the rule of law.
Your rational mind knows why Trump is doing all of this, but the stress of seeing him lure 40% of the American people into a trap from which there is no escape is often painful to watch. As an anthropologist of Trump and Trumpism, sometimes I feel as if the best thing I do is to remind you that it’s all a lie.
No matter how much he spins it, no matter how many cute brand names and catchphrases he tries to jam into the media flow, at his core, Donald Trump is a man in a rising sea of legal peril, political risk and catastrophic failures. This explains his increasingly erratic behavior and dangerous efforts to corrupt the special counsel process, the Justice Department, and American institutions more broadly.
We can be dragged down into Trump’s wilderness of mirrors , or we can take a deep breath and appreciate just how truly terrible his week was. With Trump, it’s always the worst week, since the last week.
At least next week is Infrastructure Week. We’ll always have Infrastructure Week.