Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump cares only about himself not the government he is running, similar to a captain of a cruise ship who abandons ship without ordering an evacuation. Definitely easy to imagine right? Since it happens to be true. Now imagine he needs to create the mother of all distractions to give his legal team the cover they need to try to bury the Mueller report. What better way than stopping pay for 800,000 government employees and running the country into the ground? Short of starting a war, there is not really a better way to grab the headlines.
In other words, withhold pay from 800,000 government workers until Rosenstein has resigned and Barr is in place and he is confident he can keep the Mueller report from ever seeing the light of day, or gets to “correct” it before it’s released, as his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said just yesterday.
Sure it could have devastating affects on the ability of the US government to recruit qualified employees for years to come but on the other hand it may also save Trump from the Mueller report and given the choice between those two options I think we know what he would choose. Ask Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that
President Trump’s border wall campaign has nothing to do with border security, but is instead designed to energize his conservative base and distract the country from the various scandals dogging his administration.
“I don’t even know if the president wants the wall. I think he just wants a debate on the wall. And he’s having some difficulty with it,” Pelosi said during a press briefing at the Capitol.
She also accused Trump of preventing a border deal by shifting his demands over the course of the weeks-long negotiations.
“He keeps increasing the amount of money; increasing the amount of beds; increasing the obstacles to finding a solution — because I don’t think he really wants a solution,” Pelosi said. “I think he loves the distraction that this is from his other problems.”
The only solution as far as I can tell is to make it clear what Trump is doing, and ask Republicans if they are going to continue to enable the destruction of the government they were elected by voters to run in order to assist Trump in his efforts to create a distraction and save himself from Mueller.