Let’s cut to the chase: Donald Trump should not agree to be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller — and President Trump should not even be asked.
See, there are two Trumps to consider here. There is the very eccentric and volatile man who is the subject of Mueller’s amorphous investigation. And there is the president of the United States, who has responsibilities to that vital public office. Here, the interests of both happen to align.
We’ll first examine Trump the man. No long history lesson is required here; let’s just take the last couple of weeks. Trump told a room full of lawmakers that he’d sign whatever immigration legislation they brought him —everything was negotiable. When senior legislators from both parties brought him the familiar Washington plan of amnesty now, security maybe someday, he said no way, no wall, no deal.
The eight-dimensional-chess explanation is that Trump realizes his supporters will never hold him to his commitments, so he makes bad ones in order to expose his opponents’ extremism. My preferred explanation is that Trump didn’t care what he said to lawmakers in the first meeting; his purpose was to refute Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury depiction of a demented doofus by appearing engaged and in command. Either way, the point is that Trump says stuff. And then he says other stuff. Quite often, the other stuff doesn’t match up with the first stuff.
Take this week’s sensational non-story: In June, Trump ordered his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which McGahn refused to do . . . so Trump dropped the idea and took no action.
There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the story produced by two veteran New York Times reporters, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. They have four sources who, though anonymous, appear well-placed (likely drawn from current and former White House staff, lawyers representing such witnesses, and Mueller’s investigators). And their account has the ring of truth: Trump, like all of us, longs to do things within his power that it would please him to do, but that would be really stupid to do, and so in the end he refrains from doing them. More idiosyncratically, Trump is torn between his brash persona (“You’re fired!”) and his real self (though wont to browbeat, he shrinks from personally delivering the pink slip, having subordinates do that dirty work).
More importantly, the Times report is harmless in its substance.