Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump maintains, ‘Everybody does it’
WASHINGTON — After the guilty verdicts came down against Paul Manafort on Tuesday, President Donald Trump was quick to note that his former campaign chairman had worked for Ronald Reagan and many other Republicans, implying that anyone in politics would have hired him, despite Manafort’s later reputation for operating in lobbying’s darker corners.
What about the illegal pre-election payments that longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen admitted to in a separate federal court that day, intended to hush two women alleging affairs with Trump? No more a crime than a minor campaign finance violation by the 2008 Obama campaign, Trump tweeted Wednesday.
Earlier this month Trump again dismissed suspicions about his son’s 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected operative offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. “Totally legal and done all the time in politics,” he tweeted.
Trump has long promulgated an especially dark image of politics-as-usual in America. During his campaign, he bragged of buying politicians and claimed that only he could end the corrupt scheming because “I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens.” Yet his oft-stated view that politicians are generally corrupt may have colored the conduct of both Trump and those around him, resulting in actions that could imperil his presidency.
“He thought they were stupid,” said longtime associate Barbara Res, who worked with Trump in the 1980s and 1990s, speaking of his view of the politicians he lobbied on real estate matters. “He thought they were all for sale.” Michael Gerson, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and a frequent Trump critic, in a recent Washington Post column labeled Trump’s White House the “‘everybody does it’ presidency.” “Doesn’t every campaign try to conspire with a hostile foreign government to influence an American presidential election? Doesn’t every politician try to discredit and derail a federal investigation against them? Doesn’t every prominent man pay off Playboy bunnies and porn stars after he has used and discarded them?” Gerson wrote. He answered: “No. They. Don’t.”
On Wednesday, in the wake of Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s guilty plea, many in Trump’s orbit were calling this the most difficult moment of his presidency. Some were consoling themselves that even if impeachment talk is accelerating, the bar for actually removing the president is high, and the partisan politics in a Congress currently controlled by Republicans make it unlikely.
“Most of them, I’m sure were all hoping that someday soon the Russia investigation would go away,” said Barry Bennett, a former campaign adviser to Trump. “Now it seems the Russia part has gone away but the investigation goes on.”
On Twitter early Wednesday, Trump expressed sympathy for Manafort, and praise that he’d “refused to ‘break’ ” and cooperate with the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller . He tweeted more scornfully of Cohen, who implicated the president in the crime Cohen admitted to and offered to cooperate more broadly with Mueller’s probe.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dodged reporters’ questions Wednesday about Trump’s past false statements about the Cohen payments to a porn star and Playboy model.
“He did nothing wrong. There are no charges against him,” she said several times. “Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal, that doesn’t mean it implicates the president in anything.”
Former White House staffers, demanding anonymity to avoid burning bridges to the administration, expressed relief that they no longer worked for Trump.
“You just never knew what he was going to do, but usually it would make things worse,” said one former aide.
Several current and former advisers said that Trump is now motivated by “grievances about perceived double standards,” as one put it, as he fights to maintain support from his loyal Republican base. “There’s a lot of whatabout-ism, and it’s like ‘Obama did X, Y and Z and now I’m getting yelled at,’ ” said a former White House official.
That attitude “can sometimes be because he doesn’t appreciate the very important legal nuances,” the former official added. Trump “tends to over-simplify things,” the official said. “That’s just his nature as a salesman.” Fox News and other conservative media have done their part to amplify Trump’s frustrations, repeating Trump’s claims that the investigations are a “witch hunt,” that “others have done worse” and that Clinton is the one who should be investigated. During the campaign, Trump said politicians were controlled completely by their donors, by Wall Street and by lobbyists working for foreign governments. He suggested that the rich and powerful — like himself — could do whatever they wanted when it comes to politics.
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody,” he said during one Republican primary debate. “When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”
Another former White House official said Trump holds the view that “he’s never gotten in trouble for this kind of stuff his whole career and now they’re coming after him because he’s president,” and that “he’s done stuff a lot of people do and that he’s being singled out.”
The former official said Trump’s view on Manafort, who faces a second trial next month on charges related to his lobbying for a sinceousted Ukrainian strongman, is that “this stuff isn’t legal per se, but everyone does it — it’s how the world works.”