Donald Trump and his team left “stunned” by how badly today is going for them
If you’ve been reading Palmer Report, or otherwise paying close attention to the unfolding details this week, you went into today expecting Paul Manafort to be sent to jail. You were also aware that other things were likely to go very wrong for Donald Trump today, and that this would end up being one of his most crippling days yet. Apparently Donald Trump and his team don’t read Palmer Report, based on their admitted reaction to today’s events.
Trump and his legal team were left “stunned” when a judge ordered Paul Manafort to jail, according to inside sources talking to ABC News. Stunned? Really? Nothing about this development should have been even mildly surprising to them. Manafort had been caught red-handed trying to tamper with witnesses, which – in addition to being a serious felony – was also a clear violation of his house arrest agreement. This reaction from Team Trump may actually give something crucial away.
At the risk of questioning the honesty of Donald Trump’s ahem, esteemed legal team, it’s not possible that any of them were actually “stunned” that Paul Manafort went to jail today. Emmet Flood is an experienced attorney. Jay Sekulow isn’t too swift, but he appears to grasp the very basics. Rudy Giuliani has been acting perpetually stunned for the past decade, but he’s a former prosecutor, so even he knows that judges tend to react very harshly toward defendants who try to tamper with witnesses. It’s Donald Trump who’s stunned about this, because no one around him warned him about what was really about to happen.
Donald Trump’s recent public-facing behavior suggests that he’s in his most psychologically fragile state yet. Perhaps his legal team was afraid to warn him in advance that Paul Manafort was about to be sent to jail, for fear of how he’d react. Now that it’s happened, they’re stuck playing along by pretending to be as “stunned” as Trump is. Of course the real blow for Trump is that he just figured out he’ll sit in jail during his own eventual trial if he resorts to witness tampering. Trump knows that Manafort’s current fate is his own future fate.
