With friends like this, Donald Trump doesn’t need enemies

| 3:00 pm EDT May 27, 2019
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Donald Trump has enemies galore. The majority of Americans despise him. More members of Congress call for his impeachment by the day. The majority of world leaders – including those who are allied with the United States – appear to tolerate him only grudgingly. Many of his former business partners, former political underlings, and former henchmen have fully turned against him as well. But even as forces continue to align against Trump, he continues to face an arguably even greater liability: his “friends.”

Trump’s choice of allies is working against him on two levels. On the one hand, certain foreign leaders have decided to pretend to be his friend, so they can use his narcissism against him to take advantage of him. All that Kim Jong-Un has to do to boost his position on the world stage is attack Joe Biden in Trump-ian fashion, and wait for Trump to praise him. All that Shinzo Abe has to do is be Trump’s buddy, based on Trump’s fawning reaction, does anyone doubt that Japan is getting the best Trump when it comes to trade negotiation? But it also hits far closer to home.

Trump’s favorite henchmen these days are William Barr and Rudy Giuliani. How’s that working out for him? Barr tried lying to the public about the Mueller report in such absurd fashion, he ended up having to publicly testify about it before Congress. Barr screwed that up too, and by the time he was done, poll numbers in favor of Trump’s impeachment had climbed from the high thirties to the high forties. It’s not that Barr isn’t dangerous; he’s extremely dangerous. But his is the kind of inept brashness that tends to harm Trump and America in equal measure.

Then there’s Giuliani. Make no mistake, for all his cartoon idiocy, Rudy is engaged in some serious criminal villainy. He’s been trying to plot with Ukraine to invent a phony scandal Joe Biden, in the hope of altering the outcome of the 2020 election. Giuliani belongs in prison, because he’s just that much of a criminal thug. But he’s also fantastically, and almost impossibly, bad at – well – everything.

Earlier this week Rudy Giuliani tweeted what we think may have been an attack on Nancy Pelosi, but we’re not sure, because it started with the word “ivesssapology” and became more incoherent from there. He also attached a basketball GIF that’s so obscure, sports website Deadspin believes that in order to have found it, Rudy would have had to accidentally type “raise the roof atlanta hawks” into the GIF search bar in his Twitter app. Just how addled is this guy? Later in the week, Rudy tweeted this in the middle of the night: “Check out this Yelp review for Mama Lisa Restaurant!” No review was attached.

Again, don’t underestimate the destructive power of people like William Barr and Rudy Giuliani just because Barr vastly overestimates his own infallibility, and Giuliani is almost completely mentally incompetent. They’ve both done plenty of damage to the United States while trying to criminally help their pal Donald Trump. But they’ve also done at least as much damage to Trump’s own fortunes. With friends like this, Trump doesn’t need enemies.