This is the part where Donald Trump’s remaining bad guys start selling him out
By definition, the people on Donald Trump’s political team can’t be considered the “good guys” on any level. They are the swamp. It’s why so many of them are in prison, on their way to prison, or currently under criminal or ethics investigation. But the thing about a failing criminal enterprise like Team Trump is that when it starts falling apart, the bad guys don’t hesitate to try to save themselves by selling each other out. These past few days have shown us the best evidence yet that things are indeed falling apart.
Does anyone think that Republican Senator Richard Burr woke up yesterday and suddenly grew a conscience? This guy was on the Trump transition team, so he’s known all along just how swampy Donald Trump is, yet he’s spent the past two years siding with Trump more often than not. Burr is not one of the good guys. But yesterday he felt compelled to subpoena Donald Trump Jr to testify about the Trump-Russia scandal, just one day after his own party’s Senate leader declared that all such investigations are over.
Why? That’s not difficult to parse. The redacted Mueller report reveals that in early 2017, Richard Burr was feeding information to Team Trump about the investigations into Team Trump. That didn’t get Burr criminally charged, but it put it a huge stain on his legacy of being relatively bipartisan. Since he’s retiring in 2022, he’s more worried about his reputation than he is about Trump retaliating with a primary challenger That’s why Burr subpoenaed Trump Junior. If it happens to be the right thing to do, that’s mere happenstance.
Burr isn’t the only one. The guy he almost shares a last name with, William Barr, managed to convince Donald Trump to assert executive privilege over the entire Mueller report – a nonsense move that won’t help Trump one bit, and may only serve to piss off the judges who will be deciding dozens of upcoming legal rulings about what evidence House Democrats get to have. But the move does potentially help Barr’s own legal case when he eventually has to answer for his own crimes, as he’ll argue during his trial that he wasn’t obstructing justice by refusing to turn over the Mueller report; Trump was.
Then there’s the case of former White House Counsel Don McGahn. He personally led the charge in putting alleged serial rapist and mentally unstable lunatic Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. McGahn is one of the worst pieces of filth to have ever graced the Trump regime. But because McGahn didn’t want to go to prison for obstruction of justice, he spent his entire time on the job documenting Trump’s obstruction crimes, and sold Trump out to Robert Mueller at the first available opportunity. Now McGahn is signaling his willingness sell Trump out again by publicly testifying about Trump’s crimes before Congress – not because McGahn has a conscience, but because he doesn’t want anyone looking at him when the obstruction charges come down.
It’s not that these are good people who want to do the right thing for the right reasons. It’s that these are bad people who do whatever they selfishly want to do. When doing the wrong thing helps them personally, they do it. When doing the right thing helps them personally, they do it, if only for the wrong reasons. When it all starts to hit the fan, the bad guys are usually willing to do bad things to each other – and that often ends up being a good thing for the rest of us. It’s also a sign that the walls are caving in on Team Trump. Note: This article has been updated to clarify that Richard Burr is retiring in 2022.
