Donald Trump hits the panic button as his Russia scandal explodes

File this one under too late, too late, no one’s buying it, and it’s only serving to expose just how screwed Donald Trump truly is. Over the weekend his Ukraine whistleblower scandal caused his Russia scandal to get reignited. So now he’s making a laughable panic move that reads like something out of a “how to fail” manual.

Donald Trump’s new favorite henchmen, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, jointly announced this morning that the United States will be hitting Russia with new sanctions for having meddled in the 2018 election. They’re actually just itty bitty sanctions. In fact they’re only really against one guy, and – we’re not making this up – he’s known as “Putin’s chef.”

That’s right, Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and Steve Mnuchin have decided that the best way to make the re-exploding Russia scandal go away is to slap one Russian guy on the wrist. This plan is so dumb, all it’s really doing is calling even more attention to the recent news about the Trump-Russia scandal, by keeping it in the news cycle for another day.

After this Pompeo-Mnuchin strategy predictably landed with a thud, Donald Trump decided to try a new one: he had the White House formally admit that Mike Pompeo was in on the fateful Ukraine phone call, in an attempt at scapegoating Pompeo. If this was supposed to make the whole thing magically go away for Trump, it didn’t work either – and now he’s sacrificed Pompeo for nothing.