Trump’s ever-changing story
In just over a year, President Trump has gone from denying to acknowledging that his eldest son accepted a Russian offer to help him win the 2016 election. It’s another sign of his telling shift from insisting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller won’t find anything to questioning whether he ought to be looking.
The president’s admission coincided with other changes in his stance toward Mueller’s investigation. He and his allies have gone from denying that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to arguing that doing so would not be illegal. Meanwhile, their efforts to thwart Mueller’s probe have grown more brazen.
Trump’s latest Twitter tirade included a stark description of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his close associates — his son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who is now on trial — and a Russian delegation that included the regime-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent ,” the president wrote.
That directly contradicts his account of the meeting 13 months ago, when a statement to the New York Times attributed to the younger Trump said, “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” Trump’s lawyers ultimately acknowledged, after repeated denials, that the president had dictated the statement on his son’s behalf.
The admission of the campaign’s attempt to collaborate with the Russians comes as the president’s ceaseless chanting of the mantra that there was “no collusion” has given some way to a backup defense: that colluding with Russia would not be against the law. At the same time, Trump and company continue to paradoxically argue that he is innocent of this supposed noncrime.
A Trump tweet last week exemplified this belt-andsuspenders defense: “Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion.” His latest outburst contains a similar contradiction, attempting to distance him from the Trump Tower meeting — “I did not know about it!” — even as he argues it was “totally legal.” It is, by the way, totally
illegal to collude with a foreign power to influence an election. Perhaps that’s why Trump’s efforts to undermine the investigation have become even more frantic of late. He has taken to attacking Mueller by name and has publicly called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to abort the inquiry.
For a man who maintains that he has nothing to fear from the truth, the president has worked very hard to obscure it.