The White House once again spent the week cleaning up a mess of the pr*sident's own making. After Donald Trump leveled a wild accusation last weekend about his predecessor abusing his executive powers by ordering an illegal wiretap, White House aides scrambled to make sense of it. None of his surrogates said they believed Trump, only that he had access to information that they didn't and therefore his claim could have basis in fact. Except that just three days after Sarah Huckabee Sanders hit the Sunday shows to reassure viewers that Trump may well have been the target of an FBI investigation, Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a special declaration at the end of Wednesday's White House briefing.
"I just want to be really clear on one point, which is there's no reason that we have to think that the President is the target of any investigation whatsoever," he said. "I think that’s a very important point to make.”
Oh, so maybe Trump Tower wires weren't tapped after all? The abrupt 180 came just minutes after Spicer insisted that an investigation of the claim move forward when he was asked if Trump was the target of a counter-intelligence operation.
“I think that's what we need to find out. There's obviously a lot of the concern," he responded.
Oops. That must have been the moment it dawned on the White House brainiacs that asserting Trump Tower had been wiretapped inherently implicated Trump in potential wrongdoing. Just think about that—it took them three days of talking themselves into that corner to see where they were leading the public, and in fact, demanding that investigators go.
So let's review: Immediately after Trump’s thumbs revealed his latest delusion Saturday, FBI director James Comey requested that the Department of Justice deny Trump's wiretap claim. DOJ demurred as the White House continued to press Congress to investigate the issue. But by Wednesday, White House aides themselves finally stepped in to shoot down the charge leveled by the occupant of the Oval Office. Suddenly there was "no reason" whatsoever to believe that Trump Tower might have been wiretapped as the result of an investigation.
Unfortunately for the White House, the Justice Department also declined to corroborate Spicer's statement, adding that the agency hadn't given the White House any assurances that no such investigation was taking place. So by Thursday, Spicer once again clarified that his clarifying statement the day before was born of ignorance rather than certainty. So fitting.
Question: Yesterday you said the President had no reason to believe there was any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice. Did the Justice Department give you that assurance? Because they’re telling The New York Times they did not.
MR. SPICER: I’m not aware of it, but that’s my point, is that we’re not aware of anything.
Spicer ultimately used the phrase "not aware" a dozen times during Thursday's briefing.
In some ways, this was all par for the course for the White House of popular vote loser Donald Trump: another week, another self-manufactured crisis. But this week was especially vexing because it involved a security issue that Trump would ostensibly have unique insights about given his privileged access to intelligence (of the surveillance variety, just to be clear).
Looking back, Trump's inaugural crowd-size fantasy was laughable to anyone with eyes. His 3- to 5- million fraudulent voters claim was lunacy to anyone with a brain. But his wiretapping accusation was particularly problematic because the White House used his singular access to classified information to validate it. He should be believed, they argued, because he knows things the rest of us don't. Yet by week's end, they were claiming exactly the opposite: the White House was "not aware" of any investigation.
First, we needed the investigation because of the president's special knowledge; then we needed it because no such knowledge existed.
The problem here comes with the inevitability of a national security crisis along with the White House's inevitable claim that we should trust the pr*sident’s response because he has special information. But to borrow a favorite Spicer quote, there’s no there there—it’s empty to its core. In two months, they have gutted whatever credibility Trump might have had.
In fact, House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes tried to explain away Trump's recklessness midweek as the unsupervised musings of a political "neophyte," which leads us to: And this is the man we are supposed to trust in the midst of a national crisis? It was a pathetic rationalization with absolutely frightening implications, as Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on House Intelligence, noted.
"We will have a real crisis at some point in this administration," he said, "and how much credibility will the president have left to persuade the country of what has happened, what needs to be done? How much credibility will he have with our allies to get them to back us up?"
In other news this week, Russia deployed a cruise missile that violated a critical arms control agreement, the U.S. military nearly doubled its troop level in Syria, and it responded to North Korea's latest nuclear test by deploying a missile defense system to South Korea that rankled China. Huffington Post writes:
U.S. President Donald Trump is facing what could be the most perilous nuclear-related military confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis over half a century ago.
That “real crisis” may come sooner rather than later and when that happens, we will be stuck following an overgrown man-child into battle who can't separate fact from folly and sanity from psychosis.
Our only hope is that this idiot presidency is clipped short by the indiscretions of an idiot candidate.
Donald Trump has consistently proven incapable of opening of his mouth without expelling a lie. So when he assures us, "I had nothing to do with Russia," we can therefore be assured that he did. The only question is: Was that engagement impeachable?