Breaking down a tweet:
In yesterday’s tweet Trump wasn’t exactly lying when he said he was NOT going to fire Bob Mueller. Although he denies it, it’s obvious to objective observers that he wanted his White House counsel, Don McGahn to do it for him.
And amazingly for a chronic liar he is also telling the truth when he says he did not fire Bob Mueller, because, duh, that’s obvious because Mueller wasn’t fired.
He’s also telling the truth that McGahn had a better chance of being fired than Mueller because firing Mueller would incur huge political blowback while the fairly unknown McGahn’s firing would barely register with the public.
Conitinung to parse last night’s tweet: Trump goes on to disparage the man who was his campaign counsel through 2016 and White House counsel from January 20, 2017, the very start of his presidency, until October 17, 2018 when according to McGahn and disputed by Trump he resigned not long after the president ordered him to fire Bob Mueller.
He calls him merely “lawyer Don McGahn” and says he had a better chance of being fired that Mueller.
He ends his tweet with “Never a big fan!”
What a pile of hot steaming B.S.
Of course Trump was a big fan. He feels betrayed by someone he thought was a loyal minion and now Trump’s having a hissy fit. He’s trying to block McGahn’s testifying before Congress lest the public see see the face of someone who finally saw the error of his ways and wants to tell his truth to the public.
Trump is most fearful of having Bob Mueller testify, absolutely must see TV. However, my sense is that having Don McGahn tell his story scares him too. Showman Trump knows this would be a perfect opening act for the main event of Mueller.
In his first nine months Trump had so many people get fired or resign from top jobs that the length of the list increased so much it became a running joke on the Rachel Maddow show as the lettering got smaller and smaller so the names were unreadable on the screen. Here are the notable ones from USA Today.
If Trump wasn’t a big fan of McGahn why didn’t he fire him?
McGahn managed to ingratiate himself to Trump and win his trust during the campaign when he served as campaign counsel and managed all litigation, obviously to Trump’s satisfaction.:
Wikipedia tells us that “early in 2016, he stopped efforts to keep Trump off of the Republican primary ballot in New Hampshire by going to court and winning to ensure ballot access in a key primary state. Several weeks before the election, lawsuits were filed in four battleground states alleging voter intimidation and seeking to enjoin the Trump campaign from having observers at polling locations.[McGahn successfully managed and won these litigations.”
We’re supposed to believe that Trump was never a big fan!
Trump was a fan until he realized that the White House counsel wasn’t his campaign counsel anymore and that the White House counsel wasn’t his personal lawyer.
It remains to be seen whether the current White House counsel, Pat Cipollone (who worked for William Barr from 1992-93) will be a toady, but it probably does not matter since he’s managed to appoint an attorney general, obviously a much more powerful job, who acts like his personal lawyer.