So will Donald drown in his own swamp?
AS Notre Dame Cathedral burned on Monday evening and the world watched the horror unfold, leaders from around the globe sent messages of sympathy to the people of France. Apart from one.
US President Donald Trump sent advice. He suggested using ‘flying water tankers’ to douse the inferno, adding helpfully: ‘Must act quickly!’
It would have seemed a fair bet, even to seasoned Trump watchers, that this would be the stupidest thing he would say last week.
How wrong we would have been to have placed a wager on it.
This was the week when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his inquiry into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to rig the 2016 US election was to be published, albeit in redacted form.
The President and his team had weeks to prepare for this moment, with the advantage of being the only people to see the whole thing.
They decided to hold a press conference with Attorney-General William Barr – but not the report’s author – taking questions from the media before they had the chance to read the report they were supposed to be questioning.
They seemed to have concluded that hiring a neon sign reading, ‘Time to Bury Bad News’, was superfluous.
THEN Mr Trump stood in front of a party of injured war veterans at the White House and gave his response. He was, he said simply, ‘having a good day’, adding: ‘It’s called no collusion, no obstruction.’ Later, the President went further. The report amounted to his ‘total exoneration’. Six words in response: No collusion, no obstruction, total exoneration.
Barely 24 hours later, his view had changed. Now the Mueller Report was ‘total bull **** ’ and a ‘big fat waste of time’.
Perhaps he had finally got round to reading the report by then, or it had been read to him.
Far from offering ‘total exoneration’, Mr Mueller goes out of his way to say that he cannot ‘exonerate’ Mr Trump from allegations of obstructing justice.
If the President and his people believed just six words would be an
adequate response to Mr Mueller’s detailed report of more than 400 pages then the US, indeed all of us, has a greater problem with the current incumbent of the White House than we thought.
A delusional narcissist who makes up ‘fake news’ is one thing. But one who appears to be simply thick?
The Mueller Report finds that the Russians did interfere with the US election, wanted Mr Trump to win, suggests they were effective and that the Trump campaign was happy with their efforts.
Clearly, the President and his team thought they did not need to address those issues when they crafted their six-word response.
What the report could not find was enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy, but nor could it completely rule one out – or rule out justice being obstructed since some witnesses lied, deleted evidence or refused to speak.
Even Mr Trump – the fittest, healthiest US leader ever, remember – seemed to have problems with his memory. Perhaps that is not surprising considering this President seems to make up his own facts to get through the moment. He told one of his aides to have Mr Mueller sacked, the report confirms. Yet when the Press reported that, the President dismissed it as ‘fake news’.
What the Mueller Report does is lay out the case for impeaching Mr Trump without calling for it, giving the bullets to Congress and allowing them to choose whether or not to fire them.
In my mind there is no doubt that President Trump is not fit for office and should be impeached.
But if he is proved to be a crook, he seems more Del Boy Trotter than Vito Corleone – the President may have issued orders that would have been an obstruction of justice had they been carried out but his staff often ignored his instructions.
One of the ones who did so was his counsel, Don McGahn, who refused to act to have Mr Mueller removed from the investigation. The Mueller Report details when the President questioned him, asking: ‘Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.’
Mr McGahn replied it was because he was a ‘real lawyer’. The President retorted that he once had a great lawyer called Roy Cohn who never took notes. Mr Cohn, who was Senator Joe McCarthy’s counsel, was disbarred.
IT is the 25th anniversary tomorrow of the death of President Richard Nixon. Despite his achievements in establishing links with communist China, talking peace to the USSR and withdrawing US troops from Vietnam, Nixon will always be remembered for the Watergate scandal.
In his case, his advisers did act when he conspired to cover up the Watergate break-in and he resigned before he was impeached.
Whether Mr Trump is impeached, resigns or neither, the Mueller Report makes him a challenger to Nixon’s title of the most disgraced US President of modern times.
Mr Mueller concludes that one of the reasons justice may have been obstructed by the Trump administration was the fear he would uncover other crimes.
Electoral tactics will determine whether or not the Democrats move to impeach the President.
Justice demands that they do, or that at least there is another inquiry into alleged crimes that Mr Mueller stumbled upon – but that were beyond his remit and have been redacted from his report.
Mr Trump stood as the anti-Washington, anti-politician candidate who would ‘drain the swamp’. Instead he has created one of his own. And it is time it was drained.