Donald Trump’s bizarre pardon head-fake

| 1:11 am EST December 16, 2017
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Donald Trump doesn’t understand much these days. He doesn’t get that he’s the least popular U.S. President in the history of polling. He doesn’t get that even his own Republican Party thinks he’s a joke. He doesn’t get that the Trump-Russia investigation is squarely targeting him. It’s no longer even clear that he knows where he is half the time. But he does still understand one thing: he can throw a random bit of controversial nonsense out to the media, and like a dog attacking a steak, the media will focus on it at the expense of everything else that’s going on.

We saw this on Friday when the media almost inexplicably asked Trump whether he was planning to pardon Michael Flynn. This was a question that should have been asked six months ago, not after Flynn has already cut a plea deal and surrendered whatever evidence he’s been sitting on. Trump, however, seized the moment. He answered the question by saying he didn’t want to talk about it “yet.” Sure enough, now the media is off to the races with the faux-storyline about whether Trump will pardon Flynn.

It’s almost impossible to properly underscore how ridiculous this media narrative is. Flynn has already cut a deal. He’s already given Robert Mueller what he needs to take down Jared Kushner, or Trump himself. Trump and Flynn would both gain nothing from a pardon at this point. In fact it would backfire, as a pardon would erase Flynn’s Fifth Amendment rights, and he would have to testify against Trump and Kushner anyway. In addition, Flynn is already legally locked into cooperating with state level investigations into Trump’s crimes.

Donald Trump isn’t going to pardon Michael Flynn. He simply saw an opportunity when a reporter asked him a ridiculous question. Now the rest of the media will spend days focusing on an essentially imaginary storyline, at the expense of real storylines. Trump is right that the media sometimes indulges in “fake news” for ratings. He’s just leaving out the part where he’s creating the fake news stories and getting the media to chase them.