We still don't know why Vice President Mike Pence was urgently ordered to the White House on Tuesday, forcing him to cancel an event in New Hampshire while he was en route. At a press gaggle Friday, Trump was asked about it directly.
A "very interesting problem" that will be revealed to us in a "week or two"? Oh, that's totally plausible. It's the same answer given by Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, and clearly reads as "We hope that in a few weeks time you'll have forgotten all about it because we've done some other ridiculous and/or outrageous and/or illegal thing." What actually happened on Tuesday is made even more mysterious by the White House's abrupt and chaotic turnaround on the census issue.
For hours after the Departments of Justice and Commerce announced that the census forms were being printed without the citizenship question Trump has been obsessing about for months, there was nothing from Trump. No quotes, no tweets, no word. Then, late in the day, he finally tweeted that his administration's acquiescence to the Supreme Court was fake news, throwing the administration and the courts into chaos.
The story out of the White House now about this sequence of events is that "Trump was briefed on the matter, but he was not warned of the political implications of giving up," and that he "later became upset at the appearance that the administration wasn't fighting harder on an issue that he believed all voters—and not only his core base of supporters—would be interested in."
Well, that's a stretch to believe, that Trump just went along with Attorney General William Barr and with Wilbur Ross and told them it was okay with him for them to abandon his core issue of erasing brown people out of American society. It's even harder to believe than the possibility that Trump was somehow incapacitated during those long hours after the decision was announced and before he tweeted his reversal. The only thing we can know for sure is that this administration and everyone in it will lie about anything and everything, including Trump's health.
