Donald Trump’s “Representatives of Congress” stunt isn’t the flex that he thinks it is against Jack Smith
When Donald Trump and his attorneys sent a public letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday night, asking for a meeting to discuss Jack Smith’s criminal case against Trump, the letter was cc’d to unnamed “Representatives of Congress.”
It raised a lot of eyebrows. But that was the intention, of course. Trump doesn’t like that Jack Smith is about to indict him for stealing and hiding classified documents, so he essentially complained to the manager by running to Garland. And since Trump knew Garland wasn’t actually going to meet with him, he cc’d it to Congress, perhaps hoping to… well actually, nothing. There is nothing Trump could have reasonably hoped to accomplish here.
House Republicans do not have the ability to do anything to prevent, delay, or sabotage Jack Smith’s criminal indictment of Donald Trump. There’s a reason Jim Jordan keeps publicly threatening to defund the DOJ in order to shut down the Trump probe, but then he doesn’t actually do it. It’s because it’s not a thing that he can even do. It’s just empty words aimed at pleasing Trump’s base.
Donald Trump knows that his remaining allies in the Republican House can’t help him with this, even if they’d like to. Trump can cc as many “Representatives of Congress” as he wants. It won’t change the fact that Trump is going to prison. All it does is reveal that Trump is at that late, desperate, hopeless stage of his downfall where he’s resorting to begging to be rescued from people he knows can’t help him. Trump is reduced to fantasizing about magically being saved by imaginary rescue scenarios, because in the real world no such scenarios exist for him.
