The world of make believe Donald Trump traffics in is about to hit a big massively destructive wall. After a Friday court filing from federal prosecutors in New York alleged that Trump committed a felony, Trump’s thumbs rustled up a swift response.
But the worst is yet to come for Trump and his overactive thumbs. As Democrats prepare to take over the awesome investigatory powers of the lower chamber, Trump has already been accused of criminal violations and the special counsel's probe isn't even close to culminating, as evidenced by the many redacted pages in Robert Mueller’s court filings this week. Yet Trump and his top aides have devised no plan whatsoever for how to survive the investigative tsunami headed their way next year as more revelations spill out from the Russia probe and elsewhere.
Even as Trump promised on Friday that his team would be doing "a major Counter Report" to push back on the revelations flowing from Mueller, his loquacious lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted days earlier that it had been nearly impossible to make progress on that supposed document. The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott writes:
Giuliani said it’s been difficult in the past few months to even consider drafting response plans, or devote time to the “counter-report” he claimed they were working on this summer as he and Trump confronted Mueller’s written questions about the 2016 campaign.
In fact, according to a half-dozen aides and close confidants of Trump, besides Trump's twitter counter offensive, they have no road map for how to handle what's coming down the pike.
That's surely due in part to the fact that in order to formulate such a plan, Trump and his team would have to take a clear-eyed look at what might actually emerge in Mueller's findings and what bombshells are yet to drop. But Trump is one of the least capable people on the planet to engage in such an unsparing assessment of his personal ties to Russia, the dependence of his family business on Russian money, and what role he and his campaign might have played in Russia's 2016 election interference.
Without the ability to at least guess at what will be coming at them, they're basically sitting ducks. It means whatever response they do come up with will be totally reactionary and emanating from a White House that's haphazard as ever. Trump's thumbs will almost certainly produce the quickest reactions—tweets that will have no grounding in reality, if past is prologue, and may even cause further legal complications for him.
On top of it all, in order to avoid legal exposure, some White House staffers have reportedly been deferring questions regarding the investigations to Trump's lawyers and the White House counsel's office—an office that until this week had been hollowed out and left leaderless for nearly two months. That means a White House that already functions at a colossal chaotic clip won't even be functioning at full capacity as it tries to navigate the headwinds.
And let’s face it, no matter what the planning, Trump's ability to stick to a plan and stay on message is nonexistent. He always thinks he knows better anyway. As one recently departed White House official said, "It’s like, ‘Jesus, take the wheel,' but scarier.”
Trump, by his very nature, is constitutionally incapable of recreating the playbook of presidents past to weather the microscope he’s about be put under by the opposing party. President Bill Clinton survived that very scenario, but only through extreme and often painful discipline. As former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart told The Atlantic’s Plott:
“Our strategy was very clear: We were never going to have the president talk about the investigation, ever. He was never going to portray himself as a victim, that he was being treated unfairly, even though, yes, he thought that privately.”
Trump’s approach has been the polar opposite: Talk incessantly about the investigation and, no matter what, emphasize your own victimization at every turn. We’re going to find out how well that strategy wears over time. Surely some members of Trump’s White House are more than happy to let him and his thumbs prosecute that campaign all alone.