Tricky Don
Though President Trump’s turn at the tiller may not wind up looking anything like Richard Nixon’s, similarities between the two poisonously paranoid pols are validating the old Karl Marx saw that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Well before Watergate, Team Nixon pushed hard against the First Amendment and came acropper when the Supreme Court blocked prior restraint of the New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers, despite the administration’s claims that it would endanger national security.
Last week, Trump had his personal lawyers issue cease-and-desist letters against Michael Wolff’s savage insider account “Fire and Fury,” alleging defamation, libel and abrogation of nondisclosure agreements, the last chiefly by former political guru Steve Bannon.
Giving the legal threat the guffaw in the face it deserved, publisher Henry Holt moved up the book’s release date; Wolff’s book is now the biggest seller in the country.
About those agreements, of which Trump seems deliriously fond: The President, accustomed to forcing employees to enter into such contracts from his private-sector days, seems to think he can intimidate staffers into signing on the dotted line — the better to scare the bejesus out of those telling the truth even after they leave government service.
No can do. In the White House, doing the public’s business, where some deliberations are protected from scrutiny because they’re classified or fall under the penumbra of executive privilege, NDAs ought to be DOA.
Meantime, Trump, who boasted of having a knack for hiring “the best people,” has grown so scared of his staff that personal cellphones are now off-limits in the West Wing — an edict as infantilizing as it is cruel for overworked staffers who need to stay in touch with their families.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia collusion and obstruction of justice expands, watch for the President to find himself increasingly incapable of silencing those who’ve seen bad things happen first-hand.
There’s no team of White House plumbers large enough to keep the truth from coming out.