I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending. Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out.
It has belatedly dawned on him that
(a) he lost the election he thought he won;
(b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it;
(c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and
(d) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/five-days-of-fury-inside-trumps-paris-temper-election-woes-and-staff-upheaval/2018/11/13/e90b7cba-e69e-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html (his pouting in Paris) elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety.
That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. ...
President Trump’s long struggle to destroy Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Russia scandal is officially over.
The president himself might not quite realize it yet, and he probably doesn’t understand why it happened. But he has lost that conflict, and the reason is simple: His attempts to fight Mueller were so ham-handed and so public that it made it impossible for him and his administration to shut Mueller down.
The president is simply incapable of subtlety and judges everything by how it plays out in the media. But in this case, the more attention he drew to his rage at Mueller, the greater the consequences of moving against Mueller became. And now it’s too late.
...
When Trump lashes out on Twitter in increasingly hysterical terms as he did Thursday, it might (as many have speculated) suggest that he knows something bad is coming his way. But his anger comes from impotence. If he knew he was about to get his way with Mueller, he wouldn’t be shouting about it on Twitter. It’s the fact that he can’t do anything about it that fills him with rage.
We don’t know how many more Trump aides will wind up serving time behind bars, what Mueller’s final conclusions will be or how much the president himself will be implicated in the scandal. What we do know is that Trump wanted to stop the investigation, and not only has he failed, he has made everything worse for himself.
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