Is Donald Trump trying to scapegoat Don McGahn for the failing Brett Kavanaugh nomination?

| 10:33 pm EDT September 30, 2018
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If we’re to believe various major media reports over the past twenty-four hours, White House Counsel Don McGahn – who is in charge of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process – is completely out of control, drunk with power, and even finding ways to somehow countermand the orders that Donald Trump has given the FBI. But what if something else is going on here entirely?

Donald Trump has just enough of a tenuous connection to reality that even he’s surely figured out by now that there’s a strong chance the Brett Kavanaugh nomination will fail. In these situations, Trump starts actively looking for a scapegoat. Of course Trump is to blame here. Based on his controversial time in the Bush White House alone, Brett Kavanaugh was always going to be difficult to get confirmed. Throw in his suspicious financial disclosures, and he was simply a bad pick, even before women began accusing him of sexual assault. But Trump won’t blame himself. He’ll want to blame someone else.

Trump’s words and actions make clear that he knows Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is widely respected and believed, so he knows he can’t get away with blaming it on her. That means he can’t logically pin it on any of Kavanaugh’s other accusers either. Nor would he get very far by trying to scapegoat Jeff Flake, who called for the FBI probe, but who has already voted for Kavanaugh once, and is promising to vote for him again unless the probe exposes him as an assaulter.

That leaves Don McGahn, whose job was to get Brett Kavanaugh confirmed. Trump has already announced that McGahn is a goner from the White House after the nomination process is finished. In addition, Trump recently learned through the media that McGahn has been providing significant cooperation to Special Counsel Robert Mueller for the past ten months. This guy is the perfect scapegoat for the nomination’s failure, if it fails – but only if Trump can figure out how to scapegoat him.

So when we’re reading all these stories today about Don McGahn putting weird and inappropriate yet ultimately unhelpful restrictions on the FBI probe into Brett Kavanaugh, and we’re reading that McGahn is somehow preventing the FBI from following Trump’s orders (which for the record is all but impossible), is this really going on? Or are Donald Trump and his remaining allies falsely painting McGahn as a villainous maniac in the media in order to turn public opinion against him, so Trump can blame the Kavanaugh debacle on him? Something just doesn’t add up about these reports we’re seeing today. Either McGahn is completely out of control, of Trump wants us to think that he is. Something has to give here, and soon.