Turns out Mick Mulvaney blew it for Donald Trump even worse than we thought
When a smirking Mick Mulvaney arrogantly stepped in front of the television cameras on Thursday, he committed himself to what will go down as one of the most ambitiously stupid swings and misses in modern political history. Now it turns out he actually took two of the biggest swings and misses in recent memory.
The second Mick Mulvaney confessed that Donald Trump was running a quid pro quo in Ukraine, and then said “get over it,” we all knew he’d just blown it. Whether it was premeditated or on a whim, it had a whiff of Jack Nicholson’s confession meltdown in A Few Good Men, and there was just no way it was going to end well for Mulvaney or Trump. But as of last night Trump has also angrily pulled the plug on the other thing that Mulvaney announced on Thursday.
If the official reason Mick Mulvaney held a press conference on Thursday was to announce that next year’s G7 Summit would be held at Donald Trump’s Doral property, then that’s also turned into a historic swing and miss. The announcement churned up so much backlash against Trump, even from his own party, he ended up having to confirm last night on Twitter that the G7 will not be held at Doral.
It’s still an open question as to whether these two idiotic ideas – announcing the G7 Doral stunt and confessing to the Ukraine scandal – were Donald Trump’s ideas or Mick Mulvaney’s ideas. But we all know how Trump approaches these things. Even if they were his own screw-ups and Mulvaney was merely the messenger, he’ll still blame Mulvaney for it if he feels he needs a scapegoat. Also, Mulvaney may have unwittingly revealed the existence of secret Trump tapes.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report