Donald Trump thinks he was pretty clever shifting the Russia focus to Barack Obama. He wasn't
Donald Trump and Barack Obama enjoy a light-hearted exchange with journalists in the White House in December: Getty
For
a White House that so disdains the media, it sure spends a lot of time
obsessing about it. After the giant sigh of relief that met President
Donald Trump’s speech to Congress a week ago, the unveiling of a
pared-back Muslim-majority country travel ban was put back to allow the
glow to linger a little longer. But that went out the window twenty four
hours later with the revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions
had lied about meeting with the Russian ambassador.
Rendered
apoplectic, not least by Mr Sessions’ decision (cowardly, in his view)
to recuse himself from all further investigation into alleged Russian
meddling in last year’s election, Mr Trump then found a way to change
that conversation again by making the explosive claim in a series of
Tweets on Saturday morning that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had
ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower in October without offering any
evidence to support it.
Come
Monday, unveiling the revised travel ban seemed suddenly, if not to
Trump himself, then certainly to his frazzled aides, like a good idea
again. Trump was kept off the airwaves, as three grey-haired cabinet
members, led by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, soberly presented a
new executive order that removed Iraq from the list of affected
countries and had otherwise been tweaked in hopes the courts wouldn’t
blow it up again.
This
is the pinball reality of Washington nowadays – multiple metal balls
ricocheting in all directions, unleashed by an intemperate and gleeful
player-in-chief, all accompanied by a non-stop cacophony of bells,
klaxons and flashing lights. No one can hope to keep up and no one can
tell yet if the score he is piling up in spinning neon digits is
impressively high or disastrously low. But to Trump, all that matters
for the moment is the racket and the motion.
His Towergate
play on Saturday was especially diabolical, one more masterstroke of
distraction to add to a long list of them. Like the time he said
millions had voted illegally when he was forced to confront the fact
that he had lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a mile. Or the
time he claimed record crowds for his inauguration when the rest of us
were looking at photographs of empty fields.
But
this was especially wanton. Such an assertion demanded some crumb of
proof. He surely knew no president – even he – has the legal authority
to order secret surveillance of a political rival. It would require a
green light from a judge or a court. That, moreover, would only be given
if credible evidence were already present to suggest that indeed the
Trump campaign had colluded with a foreign power to subvert the
election. Is that where Trump wants this to go?
So
there we are then. This time Trump really blew it. His most trusted
officials have been unable to contend that their boss had the faintest
idea what he was talking about when he made those Tweets, which included
the description of Mr Obama as “bad” and “sick”. Most extraordinary
were reports that James Comey, the FBI director, had asked the Justice
Department publicly to repudiate them as pure nonsense. Less than six
weeks into his first term, the law-and-order President has triggered
mutiny from the very top of his most important law-and-order agency.
Yet,
we can barely count the times we have declared with great certitude
that Trump had finally crossed a line only to find it had been drawn in
disappearing ink. That Access Hollywood tape about Trump’s boasting of sexual predation was the death of his campaign until it wasn’t.
So,
we must pull ourselves in check. Trump doesn’t ignore the rules just
because he likes to or even just because he knows his supporters want
him to. Nor is it just that he knows he won’t get punished for doing it,
at least not any time soon. His reasons for breaking the rules are
often more complicated and more devious. With this tirade, for instance,
he didn’t just change the subject, he scrambled it, a trick completed
when the White House asked Congress
at the weekend to include consideration of the Obama administration
breaking anti-snooping rules, including possible wire-tapping of Trump
Tower, in its incoming investigations into possible Trump-Russia ties.
Plenty of Republicans have already said they will go along.
Thus
several things have happened. Now when the subject comes up of Russia
and Trump, the default response of Trump’s supporters, at least, will be
be, “Ah, but look at how much worse Obama was”. It’s like the school
bully responding to being told off for some random act of violence by
concocting something much worse about someone else in the playground. In
the meantime, any White House official who is asked to offer
substantiation for this Saturday morning’s Tweets can now shrug and say
it is a matter for Congress to sort out.
Clearly
Trump reacts to things on impulse, often with the help of Twitter. The
Sessions affair was the last straw. For days, he had been fuming about
endless leaks meant to harm him and the media’s appetite for them. On
Saturday he let off steam, and the immediate fall-out may actually have
been positive for him. Indeed, by all accounts, he remains quite
unrepentant about them.
But
wait. Trump may not have been as clever as he thinks. Having your FBI
chief give you a public spanking is not clever. Giving Congress reason
to expand, not narrow, its probes into your possible collusions with
Russia during and after last year’s election is not clever. And if you
have any desire to broaden your support and rescue your approval
ratings, calling your popular predecessor a crook is definitely not
clever. Even the Kremlin on Monday was desperately trying to distance
itself from the whole mess that the topic has become in Washington.
He
may not see any of this yet, but he will eventually. This will seem
like wishful thinking to some, but the day will come when Trump’s magic
bottle of disappearing ink runs empty.
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