Here comes the big shoe dropping

When big shoes have dropped in Donald Trump’s scandals and bombshells have landed, they’ve tended to arrive without a pattern in general. Sometimes they’re bunched up. Sometimes there’s a quiet stretch. Sometimes we see hints in how the media is conducting itself. Sometimes we don’t. There’s only one tried and true giveaway for when something is about to drop – and it just happened in spades.

Yesterday Donald Trump decided that, hey what the heck, why not throw every possible distraction at the wall and see how much of it sticks. He had reality show star Kim Kardashian in the Oval Office, which generated the kind of headlines you might have expected. He went on a fifteen hour Twitter bender about how much he regrets having appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, which was controversial enough to take up a whole lot more of the media’s column space. You name it, Trump tried it yesterday.

So what the heck was Trump trying to distract us from? We learned somewhere in there yesterday that roughly a million of Michael Cohen’s digital records are in the process of being handed over to federal prosecutors. But the Feds aren’t going to turn around and leak that evidence; it won’t become public until charges are filed and court filings begin flying. We also learned yesterday that Cohen has been recording his conversations with Trump all along, and that he’s still sitting on the tapes. Is Trump afraid that the judge in the civil case is going to order Cohen to immediately surrender them, and then hand them over to Michael Avenatti?

These are very big things that can do a whole lot of damage to Donald Trump in the court of public opinion, but they’re not the kinds of things that are likely to surface in the next day or two. Trump placed his bets that yesterday was the day he needed to turn his administration into far more of a circus than usual, in order to put media narratives in play that could drown out a bombshell that might land today, tomorrow, or the weekend at the latest. Keep in mind that Trump once held a meeting with Kanye West to distract the media from the meeting between Jared Kushner and the Russians that was taking place in the same building. This is how he does things. He thinks a big shoe is hours or days away from dropping – and this is one of the rare things that he’s usually right about. Stay tuned.