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A new Vanity Fair peek behind the scenes of the Trump "administration" paints the same picture that every other insider-based story has: Donald Trump is raging around, blaming others, his aides are tearing their hair out, and everybody half expects the whole thing to burst into flames on any given afternoon.
For the first time since the investigation began, the prospect of impeachment is being considered as a realistic outcome and not just a liberal fever dream. According to a source, advisers in the West Wing are on edge and doing whatever they can not to be ensnared.
Trump is described as “apoplectic”; former Trump aide Sam Nunberg, noting Trump’s pathetic approval ratings, says Trump “can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.” As usual, the hard-liners are demanding Trump fire or retaliate against Mueller for his investigation of Trump campaign members, while the people with two brain cells to rub together are advocating he not do that.
But Steve Bannon and the crackpot Roger Stone have been stoking Trump's worst instincts, and that means nobody around Trump is safe. Not even the Golden Boy:
When Roger Stone recently told Trump that Kushner was giving him bad political advice, Trump agreed, according to someone familiar with the conversation. “Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history,” Nunberg said. “I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.”
Jared Golden Boy Kushner has been Trump's go-to errand boy for solving every problem, from Middle East peace to the opioid epidemic. If Trump is losing faith in Kushner, the boy is well and truly screwed. In his private life he's trying to stave off the financial collapse of one of his most visible New York assets; in public life the man may soon be in desperate need of one of those pre-emptive get-out-of-jail-free presidential pardons Trump has been threatening to unleash.
That aside, the reactions of Trump insiders to the Mueller probe continue to be quite interesting, in that the people closest to Trump seem quite convinced that if Mueller isn't stopped, he's going to find crookedness. It appears to be presumed as a given, as all the talk seems to revolve around how to stop the his investigation before those inevitable discoveries happen.
“Mueller shouldn’t be allowed to be a clean shot on goal,” a Bannon confidant told me. “He must be contested and checked. Right now he has unchecked power.”
What’s this talk of "shots on goal" and "unchecked power?" The man is investigating whether or not Russian intelligence efforts seeking to sway the results of last November's elections had inside help from Americans. If nobody in the White House did anything wrong, there's no reason to get so red-faced and sweaty about it. Right?