Donald Trump has achieved one thing in his time at the White House. He has sifted, sorted, hired, and fired his way through a series of sycophants to find the ones that give only the best praise. These aren’t yes men; these are “Yes, yes, yes! men” who greet Trump’s every utterance like they’re in a scene from When Harry Met Sally.
So when The Washington Post reports that both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried to talk Trump out of releasing the “transcript” of his call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that’s saying something. What it’s saying is the same thing that his staff said when they took the original transcript of the call, removed it from the normal location for such documents, and locked it deep in a server meant for critical national security information. It’s saying that Mnuchin and Pompeo could see that the conversation with Zelensky was a clear abuse of power, one that was immediately obvious to the most casual observer. Obvious to everyone except Donald Trump.
It’s possible that Trump knew the write-up implicated him in a scheme to extort manufactured political dirt from Ukraine by dangling its territory above Vladimir Putin’s invading forces. Maybe Trump was acting on the “if they won’t desert me for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue ...” theory and just assumed that no matter what he did, there would be no consequences. After all, the call with Zelensky came one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony on Capitol Hill, and Trump, ever the reality show personality, made a point of criticizing Mueller’s “performance” directly to Zelensky. Chuffed by the idea that Republicans in Congress and his hat-wearing rally fans would support him in every “deep state” conspiracy claim, Trump could have released the “transcript” simply under the assumption that he really is bulletproof.
But the simpler assumption is that Trump has become incapable of seeing his own actions clearly—if he ever could. Trump is corruption-blind. He just can’t smell the stink.
In a lifetime of real estate deals, Trump has cheated, double-crossed, overclaimed, underproduced, back-stabbed, and simply lied with near impunity. And when he’s gotten in trouble—as, for example, in one of over 3,000 lawsuits—he’s counted on the inherent value of lawyers and money, if not guns, to simply wear down any opposition. Even when he’s gone bankrupt, he’s wiggled away. In fact, in one of his New Jersey casino deals, Trump went bankrupt, convinced a group of investors to bankroll rebuying the property on the cheap, deliberately bankrupted the investors, bought the property even cheaper, and went bankrupt again. And he still came back to New York and got a nice loan from Deutsche Bank.
It’s not exactly been a charmed life for Trump as it has been a lesson in just how hard it is for people born on third base to ever get pushed back as far as second. Being born wealthy and with a “name” has reliably papered over disasters.
So when Trump looks at the cobbled-together not-a-transcript of his conversation with Zelensky, he doesn’t see problems. For him, his low-budget mafia movie dialogue in getting across his demands is “perfect.” The way he plays the Ukrainian president to let him know that, if he wants his nation to survive, he has to give Trump what he wants is “beautiful.”
In a half-hour conversation, Trump tells Zelensky that America is doing a lot for him, but Ukraine is not doing enough for us, and makes it clear that, if Zelensky wants to see any military aid, he needs to do a favor for Trump—details to be provided by Rudy Giuliani and William Barr.
Trump may dispute that, but he also sees nothing wrong with it. “Even if I did” is the beginning to Trump statements on everything from campaign violations to bribery. He’s absolutely convinced that “even if he did” do something wrong, it’s not wrong. Because he’s never wrong. Right, yes, yes, yes men?
This time Trump probably should have listened to the sycophants whimpering in the corner. The cover-up here is bad, but the crime appears to be even worse.
And there’s another reason that Mike Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin really, really wish Trump had just carried on with the cover-up. It’s that they are in this thing up to their respective necks. Both were aware of the phone call, and of Giuliani’s activities, and that Trump was withholding funds from Ukraine. Also, someone ordered that the original transcript of the call be locked down on a top secret national security server. That someone probably was not Trump.
It was someone who could still see that what Trump was doing in Ukraine wasn’t just wrong, but a disaster waiting to be revealed.