Donald Trump finally bites off more than he can chew
Almost since the day he illegitimately took office, Donald Trump has been choking on the splinters of his Russia scandal and his various other criminal scandals. He’s managed to just barely keep it all down, as he’s moved from scandal to scandal, battle to battle, distraction to distraction. He’s not winning by any measure, as his underlings keep getting picked off and his toxic unpopularity threatens to hand the opposition party the power to crush him. But even as he’s lost one battle after another, he’s managed to remain in the game – though that may have finally changed.
Palmer Report has long talked about how Donald Trump’s presidency may not meet its demise due to one explosively scandalous moment, so much as the cumulative effects of death by a thousand cuts. It wasn’t the White House tapes, or the John Dean flip, or any one moment that finished Richard Nixon off, so much as that it all piled up to the point that it finally tipped the scales. That brings us, incredibly, to the subject of Omarosa.
Omarosa is a widely reviled figure who has little credibility or favor with anyone. She was a villain on the Apprentice. She’s been a villain in the White House. Yet somehow, despite not being able to find anyone willing to take her word, and despite clearly doing all of this to try to sell more copies of her new book, Omarosa has managed to change the discussion entirely.
Large chunks of yesterday’s White House press briefing, and thus large chunks of yesterday’s and today’s cable news coverage, have been devoted to the question of whether Trump used the N-word. People like Penn Gillette of Penn & Teller are now publicly confirming that they heard Trump say racist things on the Apprentice set. Tom Arnold, who has long made the claim that he once saw this tape, is looking more vindicated by the minute. This is remarkable when you consider that while Omarosa does have damaging secret recordings of Trump, she isn’t even claiming to have possession of the N-word tape.
Don’t discount how damaging this public discussion is to Donald Trump. To anyone who truly understands what racism is, it’s been clear that Trump is a racist from the very first day of his campaign, and in fact long before that. But there are suburban white people sitting home who still think that racism only consists of using the N-word. If you want evidence, take a look at the fact that Papa John Schnatter managed to get away with saying and doing various thinly veiled racist things for years – until he used the N-word on a conference call, after which he was promptly fired from his own company.
Donald Trump’s allies are now scrambling to try to figure out how to deal with the unknown of what comes next. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is constantly willing to lie for Trump, said yesterday that she couldn’t “guarantee” that there is no tape of Trump saying the N-word. She’s so afraid of this situation that for once, she’s unwilling to stick her neck out for him. And all of this is happening because a disgraced reality star, whom no one even believes in general, merely claims that there’s a tape of it out there somewhere.
Let’s face it: Omarosa is an incrementally more effective sociopath than Donald Trump is. She managed to leverage it into landing a high-paying, do-nothing White House job. She knew it wasn’t going to last forever, so she managed to leverage it into a big payday on a book. He was disloyal to her, so now she’s being disloyal to him. Neither of these people should be anywhere near the American political stage. But at the rate it’s going, Omarosa is unraveling Trump’s presidency by the hour. She’s using Trump’s own deranged tactics against him – and she’s better at it than he is.
