Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017566
The Trump Presidency
Truth -v- Misinformation
Trump's anger grows as more and more people agree to speak
Peter Burgess
US President Donald Trump participates in a roundtable on the FIRST STEP Act in Gulfport, Mississippi on November 26, 2018. - President Trump has endorsed the FIRST STEP Act and has called on Congress to swiftly pass this bill to make our communities safer and our justice system fairer. This legislation has been endorsed by law enforcement organizations, faith leaders, and state officials like those in Mississippi who have seen the benefits of prison reform. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Zip that lip.
Donald Trump has made one thing very, very clear. He doesn’t like whistleblowers. Leakers. Ratfinks. Stoolies. Anyone who values telling the truth over staying silent out of some twisted loyalty—or deep-seated fear—toward Trump. But Trump’s ability to control the narrative and silence the people around him is crumbling, and as The Washington Post reports, all those loose lips are making Trump very angry.
That’s because Trump senses how the wind has shifted. With State Department officials like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch appearing before the House even though they’d been ordered not to cooperate, and Defense Department officials like Laura Cooper following in the same path, Trump and his advisers can see that the whole impeachment inquiry is “snowballing.” And that they have very little they can throw in its way.
Even the stunt organized between the White House and House Republicans on Thursday managed to only keep Cooper cooling her heels in an antechamber until Matt Gaetz and company tired of standing around, watching reporters not eating pizza. Then Cooper came out and talked anyway.
Trump is already “frustrated that his efforts to stop people from cooperating with the probe have so far collapsed under the weight of legally powerful congressional subpoenas.” And he’s going to get even angrier, because now that a Federal judge has ruled, as expected, that the impeachment inquiry is … an impeachment inquiry, those subpoena’s come supercharged by a level of authority even higher than they enjoy in normal times.
House investigators are charging ahead—meaning that they even had a hearing scheduled for Saturday—and the inquiry is confidently sending those subpoenas to active White House advisers. And, unlike with the Russia investigation where even former members of White House staff hid behind the “don’t go” notes Trump provided, this time people are planning to show.
As the depth of his problems have become clear, Trump has re-hired some attorneys that were part of his team in the middle of the Mueller investigation. Those attorney’s are helping to set up the long talked about “war room” and looking for road blocks they can throw in front of witnesses. But with the pace of revelations, and the obvious nature of Trump’s Ukraine scandal, even his expanded legal team is having trouble getting a handle on an approach. New witnesses keep busting through the edges of the narrative before Trump’s team can even get out the talking points, and the process continues to move along faster than Trump’s ability to distract.
Top level members of Trump’s team, such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, have continued to state that they’re not going to testify before the inquiry. They may change their minds now that a judge as made it clear that the process arguments mounted by the White House are nonsense, and this impeachment is as serious as a heart attack. For Trump. Officials, like those at OMB and the DOD who have refused to produce documents might also have a change of heart.
If not, someone in the handful of holdouts will make an excellent example of what Congress can do to enforce a subpoena during an impeachment. Expect to see Perry and Mnuchin on the stand, because neither one of them has the temperament to be a going-to-jail-for-Trump martyr.
There’s a reason Donald Trump hates it when people talk. Because every time they do, the evidence against him becomes stronger, and Trump becomes weaker.