Donald Trump swings and misses as it all crashes down on him
There are plenty of times in life, and in politics, when the outcome is unclear. Those are the times when it’s best not to make a prediction. But there are other times where it’s easy to see exactly what’s coming. Some folks are predictable enough that you already know what they’re going to do once they find themselves in a given situation.
Take, for instance, the last ditch move by Donald Trump’s lawyers yesterday. Yesterday they told the media that the Manhattan District Attorney had told them that Trump himself will not be included in this week’s indictments – the key phrase being this week. Trump’s lawyers were obviously hoping the media would take the bait and run with false headlines announcing that Trump wasn’t going to be indicted, period. Sure enough, Politico gleefully took that bait, in a headline that created confusion and muddied the waters about Trump’s upcoming fate.
This was all entirely predictable, on both counts. As for the antics of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen – who knows all about how Trump operates – called it a “typical Trump play…try to create an alternate narrative thinking the more it is repeated, the harder it will be for the NYDA’s office to do anything else.” He went on to add that it’s not going to work.
As for Politico’s antics, months ago Palmer Report warned everyone that once we were finally on the eve of the first round of indictments, the media might try to create controversy and drum up ratings by pretending that it would be the only round of indictments. Sure enough, that’s exactly what Politico did. Fortunately, most of the rest of the media refused to take the bait, and some MSNBC hosts even made a point of having legal experts explain why the Politico headline wasn’t real.
So yeah, a lot of this is as predictable as ever. But the real upshot is that Donald Trump is so thoroughly backed into a corner, he’s completely out of real strategies. He and his lawyers are reduced to trying to manipulate the media into tricking the public into believing that he’s somehow off the legal hook because only the Trump Organization is being indicted and he himself hasn’t been indicted yet. Talk about a swing and a miss. It’s just getting sad.
