Even in Victory, Trump Shows His Weakness
Predictably, the president is overselling his supposed exoneration — and demonstrating why he’s unfit for office.
Not out of the woods yet.
Photographer: Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty Images
It took all of one day after Donald Trump was cleared of criminal liability in the special counsel’s probe for the president to demonstrate exactly why his impeachment has been an on-the-table topic almost from day one.
It’s one thing for Trump to congratulate himself on “Complete and Total EXONERATION” even though Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the investigation said no such thing. If the president wants to do a victory lap because he’s not going to be prosecuted — at least for this set of charges – well, that’s a pretty low bar, but he’s welcome to it.
On Monday, though, a more alarming strategy emerged. Evidently, the White House now wants to use the story to launch an attack on all of the president’s perceived enemies – calling for critics to be banned from television programs, demanding that various House Democrats lose their committee posts, and even suggesting that those who called for investigations were, in the president’s words, “evil” and “treasonous.”
Every president, I’d be willing to bet, thinks things like that. Many presidents, I’m confident, say such things to their friends and associates. That’s natural and understandable in the heat of Washington conflict. But to say these things out loud, as Trump does on a regular basis? That’s simply not acceptable for the president of a democratic nation. Nor is it acceptable to insist that the Justice Department investigate his political opponents, as Trump does regularly and as his lawyer Rudy Giuliani did again on Monday.
It’s all a form of undermining the rule of law. It’s an abuse of power.
As it happens, it’s also bad presidenting. By all reports, the president and his allies know nothing more about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report than the rest of us do. And yet we know that Trump is already badly overselling his supposed vindication on obstruction of justice and may well be overstating his exoneration on conspiring with Russia. As several people have pointed out (see links below), there’s a large gap between not being criminally liable and having done nothing wrong. And while it’s possible that the full Mueller report will clear Trump and his associates of all wrongdoing, there are quite a few facts on the record suggesting that a clean bill of health — a Complete and Total EXONERATION — is unlikely.
In any event, Trump got exactly the headlines he must’ve wanted on Monday. His administration might have used a day of good press to shift some attention to their favored policy proposals or other positive news they wanted to highlight. The president also might have made a point of condemning Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and acknowledging that a thorough investigation was in fact needed.
Instead, Trump and his allies immediately reminded everyone how little respect this president has for democratic norms and set themselves up for political damage if the Mueller report doesn’t live up to their spin. Meanwhile, they’ve put themselves in an impossible position when the Democrats call for the full report to be released; all but the most extreme partisans will see the contradiction between claiming that the report totally vindicates the president and also claiming that no one should see it.
In other words, instead of taking a win and building on it, Trump took all of one day to oversell it, increase the likelihood that more damaging information will be publicly released, and remind everyone that he’s still unfit for the office he holds.
1. Cristina Bodea and Raymond Hicks at the Monkey Cage on Trump’s criticisms of the Federal Reserve.
2. Rick Hasen on Chief Justice John Roberts and gerrymandering.
3. Noah Berlatsky on public scholarship.
4. Nicholas Bagley on the administration’s new position on an Affordable Care Act lawsuit.
5. Margaret Sullivan on press coverage of the Trump-Russia story.
6. Robert Litt at Lawfare with a close reading of the Barr letter.
Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.