The morning’s back-and-forth on whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had been fired, had resigned, or was still in his job (the answer appears to be C, for now) may have been an effort to distract from the ongoing Brett Kavanaugh disaster, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reports.
According to a source briefed on Trump’s thinking, Trump decided that firing Rosenstein would knock Kavanaugh out of the news, potentially saving his nomination and Republicans’ chances for keeping the Senate. “The strategy was to try and do something really big,” the source said. The leak about Rosenstein’s resignation could have been the result, and it certainly had the desired effect of driving Kavanaugh out of the news for a few hours.
This is very stupid, but also sounds like something Donald Trump would absolutely believe for at least 10 to 15 minutes at a time. The thing is, as long as Kavanaugh is a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States of America and is the subject of sexual assault allegations, he will remain in the headlines. Even the constitutional crisis of Trump firing someone who stands between himself and the Mueller investigation will only do so much to distract from Kavanaugh—and since Kavanaugh appears to have been selected in part to protect Trump from investigation, the two stories dovetail in a way that might not create the exact distraction Trump would be looking for.
Firing—or pretending to fire—Rosenstein to create a distraction is a sign that Trump is feeling the pressure on Kavanaugh. Sherman reports that some Trump allies are urging him to ditch Kavanaugh for an easier-to-confirm nominee like Amy Coney Barrett (a woman!), and that Trump has been privately trashing Kavanaugh and the Republican establishment he says pushed Kavanaugh on him.