Donald Trump Jr. (photo: Alex Wong)
13 July 17
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: Donald Trump Jr.’s emails, Republican silence, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s last attempts to get a health-care bill passed.
fter Donald Trump Jr.’s constantly shifting explanations for his meeting
with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, we now know that he, Jared
Kushner, and Paul Manafort were eager to receive incriminating
information about Hillary Clinton that was offered as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Is this the smoking gun investigators have been waiting for?
There will be no single smoking gun that will bring
down this White House. It will be death by firing squad — or perhaps a
sequence of firing squads — as the whole story inexorably pours out of
the administration’s smoldering ruins. This week’s bombshell has the
feel of gallows humor. Trump Jr.’s panicked release of the self-incriminating emails
is tantamount to picking up a loaded gun and shooting himself in the
head.
Why did Little Donald not do what the Trumps always do in these
situations — let the press (in this case the Times) go ahead
and report its incriminating findings, rail against leakers, and then
dismiss the latest incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing as “fake
news”? Was Little Donald trying to protect his father from even worse
revelations? To take down his brother-in-law even as his brother-in-law
(a possible source of the emails) tried to take down him? To deliver a
message from or to the Kremlin?
Some politicians, lawyers, and pundits are
characterizing the emails as legal proof of perjury, the felonious
solicitation of a campaign contribution from a foreign national, or even
treason. But these are opinions, not the findings of judges or
investigators.
Even if the opinions are sound, they may hardly be the
sum of the matter. For all we know, the released email chain may be only
a small and relatively minor part of a much larger criminal web that
stretches from Donald Trump’s tax returns to his and the Kushner
family’s respective real-estate dealings in Russia and beyond. The
authorities who matter — the investigators at the special counsel’s
office and the FBI — are not telling us what they are up to. They may
already know — or may soon know — of evidence far more incriminating
than the revelations of the past 72 hours. Even this morning we are
learning via McClatchy’s estimable Washington bureau that investigators
are looking into possible coordination
between the Jared Kushner–run Trump campaign digital operation and
Russia’s “sophisticated voter targeting and fake-news attacks on Hillary
Clinton in 2016.”
The good news for those who want to see justice done is that this scandal not only resembles Watergate but also The Godfather — albeit a Godfather where every Corleone is a Fredo and not a single lawyer is as crafty as Tom Hagen, despite the fact that Little Donald’s private attorney has a history of defending clients from mob families.
The level of stupidity of the conspirators is staggering: Not the least
of the week’s news is that Kushner thought he could get away with omitting this Trump Tower meeting on the government questionnaire he filed to get his security clearance. (The $2.5 million that Charles Kushner donated to Harvard to gain his son admission
was not money well spent.) My other favorite detail of the week (so
far) is that Rob Goldstone, the former British tabloid writer and Miss
Universe entrepreneur who served as the Trump campaign’s Russian
middleman, posted on Facebook that he was “preparing for meeting” at Trump Tower on the day it took place.
Now it’s every man (and his lawyer) for himself as the
president, having hidden from the press and the public ever since he
returned home from his Yalta-themed tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin,
escapes to France, of all places. His press secretary is also in hiding,
as is his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who as recently as Sunday
dismissed the Donald Jr. story as a “nothingburger”
— Trumpspeak for the Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler’s designation of
Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.”
About the only administration
stalwart not remaining silent is the vice-president, whose statement
following the release of the Donald Jr. emails let it be known that he was “not aware”
of the Trump Tower meeting and that it had taken place before he joined
the campaign. Mike Pence has clearly been boning up on Gerald Ford, and
may already be brooding about the risks entailed if he should
eventually be in the position to pardon the 45th president.
Republicans in Congress have been slow to respond to this story, if they’ve commented at all. Is silence an effective strategy?
It’s not a strategy. It’s desperation. Much like
their predecessors in the Nixon era, they keep hoping somehow it will
all go away so they can get back to business as usual. After all, it was
less than a month ago that David Brooks, writing in the Times, reassured
them that there was “little evidence” of “any actual collusion between
the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians” and that “most voters don’t
really care” anyway. Prominent Republicans continued to use this script
after the release of the Trump Jr. emails, with Orrin Hatch calling the
story “overblown,” Peter King characterizing the campaign-hierarchy meeting with the Kremlin-connected lawyer as “a one-off, inadvertent mistake,” and Bob Corker dismissing the whole affair as “politics.”
Even the occasional Republican eminence who tried to take a stand this
week could muster only the usual bland utterances that the latest
revelations were “disturbing” and “problematic,” as Lindsey Graham put it. A furrowed brow is still what passes for bravery among Republican politicians these days.
They can run from reality and reporters, but they can’t hide indefinitely. As I’ve written before,
the closer we get to the 2018 midterms, the faster Republicans in the
House — and some of those up for reelection in the Senate — will
scramble for the lifeboats. But by the time they wake up and see the
looming iceberg, it may be too late to save their careers.
Also yesterday, Mitch McConnell delayed the Senate’s August recess by two weeks and announced that a new version of the Senate’s health-care bill will
be revealed on Thursday, with a new Congressional Budget Office score
to follow. Will he eke out a legislative accomplishment by the end of
the summer?
Wasn’t it only yesterday that we were reading
those pieces about the wily legislative genius of Mitch McConnell?
Trapping the Senate in Washington is not going to lead to the passage of
the latest rewrite of the Senate health-care bill (whatever is in it).
What we are likely to get instead is two weeks’ worth of television
shots of Republican senators scurrying down the halls or shutting their
office doors to escape reporters. Other things not happening this summer:
tax reform, an infrastructure initiative, or the raising of the federal
debt ceiling. The vacuum will be filled by the steady drip, if not
flood, of White House revelations that neither the president nor his
Capitol Hill enablers, apologists, and collaborators can stop.
If McConnell were really canny, what he’d be doing
right now is gaming out how his party will respond to the next looming
constitutional crisis: Trump’s inevitable version of the Saturday Night
Massacre, in which Robert Mueller is fired, and Rod Rosenstein along
with him. For all of us, a little perspective is in order. Little Donald
is not the story here any more than G. Gordon Liddy and those
third-rate burglars were the story in Watergate. We are likely to reach a
point when this week’s firestorm will be remembered mainly as a warm-up
for conflagrations yet to come.
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