Trump Is Starting to Panic - By Frank Rich

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Trump Is Starting to Panic

- By Frank Rich


Since the Democrats made gains in last week’s election — and, in some places, may continue to make more still — Donald Trump has retreated into what the Los Angeles Times calls “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment,” canceling travel plans, lashing out at allies and adversaries, meddling in the remaining undecided races and, apparently, sitting for hours of meetings with his personal lawyers. Should we take his tantrums as an early indicator of additional bad news?

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending.

Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety.

Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule.

He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice.

Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired.

It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.


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