Thank You, Don McGahn Like so many others, he saved Trump from a major political blunder.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thank-you-don-mcgahn-11556057923
President Trump should be savoring the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with no charges of collusion or obstruction of justice, but as ever he can’t stand prosperity. His post-report scrap with former White House counsel Don McGahn shows how this President is so often his own worst enemy.
As part of his obstruction “analysis,” Mr. Mueller recounts that in June 2017 Mr. Trump asked Mr. McGahn to ask Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to say Mr. Mueller had conflicts of interest and couldn’t remain as special counsel. Mr. McGahn took notes but no action, sought advice from White House colleagues, and planned to resign until the President dropped the subject.
But firing Mr. Mueller would have been dumb and self-defeating, as Mr. McGahn and nearly everyone else in the White House understood. Mr. Trump was raging against an investigation he thought deeply unfair, but firing Mr. Mueller would have made the President look guilty when we now know he wasn’t. It would have triggered a political crisis for Democrats to exploit, which is why they were hoping he’d fire Mr. Mueller.
Mr. McGahn thus saved Mr. Trump from his own bad political judgment. Mr. McGahn also behaved as he should have by refusing to follow an order he thought was wrong. Resignation would have been the honorable alternative had Mr. Trump insisted.
The episode underscores that Americans should be grateful that capable people have been willing to work for this President despite the political assault on them for doing so. As former Bush State Department official Eliot Cohen put it, anyone who worked for this President would lose “nothing less than a piece of their souls.” But men and women are serving the country and the Presidency more than Mr. Trump personally, and their sound judgment has saved the country from many blunders.
“Nobody disobeys my orders,” Mr. Trump said Monday, but that is false. We know Mr. Trump wanted to withdraw from Nafta but was talked out of it. He wanted Reince Priebus to seek the resignation of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General but Mr. Priebus didn’t. He wanted to order the Justice Department to block the AT&T -Time Warner merger, but former aide Gary Cohn refused to do so.
There have been many other times when aides and Republicans in Congress like Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan talked Mr. Trump down from destructive behavior or decisions. Their reward for preventing bad policy has been sneers from the media. Yet these aides and Republicans have done more to push Mr. Trump in a constructive direction than all of the partisan critics who have no influence with the President.
The Mueller report vindicates Mr. Trump on Russian collusion and obstruction, but its narrative does reinforce a core problem with Mr. Trump’s governance: His frequent and almost casual dishonesty. He lied to the public about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting after it was reported in the press, yet the report shows he had no reason to do so. Out of what seems to be pique or pride, Mr. Trump is now claiming Mr. McGahn isn’t telling the truth though the episode shows Mr. Trump backed off his bad judgment.
So much of Mr. Trump’s dishonesty seems to flow from his ego, which can tolerate no slight and no suggestion that he is capable of mistakes like the rest of us. Yet the result of his falsehoods is to undermine the credibility that any President needs in a crisis.
All of this also underscores that Mr. Trump’s character as President will be his main re-election vulnerability. On policy he should be a favorite based on the economy and the Democratic Party’s sharp left turn. But voters will balance that against Mr. Trump’s personal behavior and whether they want to spend four more years in the Trump maelstrom.
Voters might not settle for prosperity if Mr. Trump won’t. Meantime, thank you, Don McGahn.
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