No, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani don’t have a magic wand for surviving this

| 11:12 pm EDT May 3, 2018
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Now that Rudy Giuliani has convinced Donald Trump to resort to a “keep punching myself in the face until I magically look prettier” defense strategy, the Resistance should be popping as many bottles of champagne as possible. Yet, even as I’ve tried to explain why the new Trump-Rudy strategy is rather obviously destroying what little is left of Trump’s presidency by the hour, some within the Resistance tell me they’re worried that Trump and Rudy are carrying out some sort of genius plan.

I’ll save you a lot of worrying: they’re not. There is no smart plan here. This isn’t evil genius at work. That is absolutely, one million percent, not the case. All you have to do is observe Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump to see that their brains are barely functional. We don’t know for sure if Rudy has suffered a psychotic break that’s led him to believe that confessing to all of Trump’s crimes is going to magically get him off the hook, or if Rudy is desperately throwing Trump under the bus to try to protect himself in the Trump-Russia scandal. But one of those is definitely the case.

Trump is going along with what Rudy is selling because Trump’s brain is broken. If he was an evil genius in years past, he’s an evil buffoon these days. There’s a reason Trump’s own top people, who have seen his strategies up close, have called him an “idiot” and a “dope” and a “moron.” If Trump knew how to play any of this, he’d have a high approval rating, a strong legislative record, and he’d have found a way to make his scandals go away by now. Instead the opposite is true on all counts. Most of his decisions have only served to make things even worse for him, because he has no idea what he’s doing. Trump has no plan. Rudy has no plan for saving Trump, at least not a mentally competent one.

Some folks keep telling me that Donald Trump must secretly be an evil genius, because he’s survived in office this long. But that’s simply not how things work. Our system was built to make it a painfully slow process to remove any president, so the opposition party can’t simply oust a good president for partisan reasons. That’s the only reason Trump hasn’t yet been taken down. Since taking office, you can’t point to one decision Trump has made with regard to his scandals that worked out well for him. He has no magic wand. He has no plan for surviving this. Neither does Rudy. Stop giving these morons leverage they don’t have, by assuming they know what they’re doing. They don’t.