Donald Trump has a problem here. How do you get attention off of a problem when nothing you try is working anymore? If he hasn’t already hit that wall, Trump is getting dangerously close to slamming into it head first. And while this may be Hair Furor’s current dilemma, depending on how the next little while goes, it may well become the least of his worries.
The nagging problem of course, like a popcorn hull stuck between your tooth and gum is the Russia election kerfuffle. It used to be easy to deflect from it. When it first came up, he heatedly denied it. Then he called it “fake news” until it practically became an entry in the Urban Legend dictionary. When tantalizing details that verified the stories started to leak out, he decried those as “fake news” and immediately shifted the focus from the Russian connection to the illegality and national security implications of the leaks themselves. And the media reacted just like Pavlov’s dog when the bell rang, running straight over to the chute to wait for another pellet. Then he waved his magic wand and claimed Obama had illegally ordered his campaign office wiretapped, and the media bit once again.
When specific names started coming out, Trump tried to create distance by minimizing the importance of, or the influence on Trump and the campaign by the offender. Paul Manafort is a perfect example. When he became covered with Ukrainian oligarch pocket lint, it was explained that Manafort had a very limited involvement in the campaign for a very short period of time. He was the freakin’ campaign CEO for 5 months, and basically ran the convention! But again the media dog chased the car.
Not anymore. Now, when Trump or one of his shills tries to change the subject, the media drags him back to it, even tying the distraction into the main point when possible. And even when Trump takes the extreme step of some outside direct act as a distraction, either the pundits or one of their guests immediately pivots. Here’s a couple of examples. The night Trump gave the command to launch the missiles, within three hours, one of the guests on MSNBC noted that whatever the outcome or effect, Trump was satisfied with the outcome because nobody was talking about the Trump-Russia probe. And today Richard Engel, being interviewed from London on MSNBC was asked for his opinion on whether the meetings were a success. His reply was that it depended on your definition of success, even if nothing much was settled or solved, we weren’t talking about the Trump-Russia probe at the moment, so it was a success for Trump. The media has finally stopped chasing the tennis ball, and is now not only ignoring the distractions, they’re consciously bringing the probe back to the forefront of the conversation.
And the media isn’t the only one. For once in his miserable, morally bankrupt life, Trump isn’t being paranoid. From the day this scandal broke, he hasn’t been able to make it go away, and for a good reason. In the early days, every time the story started to fade in the media, another tantalizing nugget was leaked, expanding just enough to keep the story moving forward, forcing the media to highlight it. There is a huge risk in this for Das Donald. Once a bone is gnawed until all of the flavor is gone, the only way to keep the dog interested is to add some more meat to it. In this case, it means a steady diet of new details and leaks. And now, it’s advanced to the point that information was leaked to the Washington Post gleaned from a FISA court warrant, one of the most sacrosanct secret documents that the US government has, a leak of or from one is almost unheard of.
Now it is getting truly dangerous for Trump, and his whole Presidency. The leaked warrant information specifically names Carter Page, an early foreign policy advisor to the campaign who has already gotten the “never hearda da bum” treatment from the campaign, and who was already under a cloud after it was disclosed that he had admitted being unwittingly recruited as a source by Russian spies as the subject. Now, the FBI is hoping to have a Kremlin connected Russian hacker implicated in the election interference in their clutches after his arrest at their request in Spain, and it was reported yesterday that out of nowhere, Paul Manafort was in negotiations with the government to retroactively register as an agent of a foreign power for his lobbying work for the Ukraine several years ago. If this sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the same thing that Michael Flynn did to try to cover his ass for his lobbying work for Turkey. The speed and scope of this investigation is heating up, and it is becoming more likely that before too much longer somebody is going to sing to save their ass.
This is what it looks like when you have an engaged population and an aggressive, independent press. Seems to me that if anybody out there is a lawyer, and wants to be able to retire in a few years, it might not be a bad idea to move to Washington and get a bunch of business cards advertising as an expert in foreign corruption cases.