When it was revealed that the Trump White House requested to the Navy that they move the USS John McCain prior to Donald Trump visiting the American naval base at which it was stationed, the Team Trump response was predictable. Trump himself denied it happened. But it turned out it did happen, though acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan was evasive as to how much effort he would put into looking into the matter. This morning, he elaborated further: It was the White House Military Office that made the request.
So now we're at the next predictable stage of any humiliating Team Trump scandal: Okay, sure, that might have happened, but Actually it's perfectly reasonable because reasons. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney (at this point everyone in the administration is designated as "acting", down to the chefs, cleaning crew and First Lady) popped on to several of the Sunday shows to argue that the White House asking the navy to hide a ship because President Stable Genius gets upset at mention of certain names is a "nothing."
"The president's feelings about the former senator are well-known," Mulvaney added. "The fact that a low-level person might have asked the question shouldn't surprise anybody. We think it's much ado about nothing." [...]
"If a 23- or 24-year-old person says, 'Look, is it really a good idea for this ship to be in the background?'—that is not an unreasonable question to have and it certainly is not something that takes up two minutes of national television on Sunday," he said.
There is nothing to see here, move along: A "low-level" White House staffer simply surmised, not unreasonably, that the current commander in chief of our military forces would get rattled by seeing a name on the side of a boat and asked the navy to ... hide it. To avoid pissing Dear Leader off. Because that is a thing the military might be asked to do now, and it shouldn't "surprise anybody."
Well, you've got to grant him that. Team Trump going so far as to ask to hide a warship to protect Donald Trump's fee-fees may be a lot of things, but you can't say it's surprising.