Donald Trump admits Donald Trump Jr is hosed
Publicly, Donald Trump has come out swinging this week. Actually it’s been more like flailing and whining, but there’s no doubt that Trump has taken an increasingly combative public position the past several days, as his criminal scandals zero in on him. However, behind the scenes it’s a different story. In fact Trump seems to have privately figured out that his son Donald Trump Jr is hosed.
Even as Donald Trump yells things like “Rigged Witch Hunt” more loudly than ever on his Twitter account, and leads the attendees at his rallies in the delusional fantasy that it’s Hillary Clinton who will somehow go to prison for imagined crimes, he’s admitting behind closed doors that the Trump-Russia scandal is indeed a criminal scandal with criminal consequences. More specifically, he’s admitting that he knows his son broke the law.
Donald Trump’s close confidants are now telling the Washington Post that Trump is fearful “that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have wandered into legal jeopardy.” To be clear, no one accidentally commits a crime like this. If you buy a painting and it turns out to have been stolen goods, you’ve inadvertently wandered into legal jeopardy, and you’ll need to reasonably demonstrate that you didn’t know it was stolen. But if you knowingly meet with a foreign government to try to obtain something that was stolen from the opposing campaign, the law doesn’t give out a free pass just because you claim you didn’t know that doing so was illegal.
In other words, Donald Trump is admitting that Donald Trump Jr has committed a crime and that he’s hosed. It’s worth noting that if Trump Jr goes down for this, so does Trump. This past week we learned that Rick Gates, who has already cut a plea deal, and Michael Cohen, who is on his way to a plea deal, can both testify that Trump signed off on his son’s meeting. Trump seems to be delusionally rationalizing that his son will go down for their shared crime, but he won’t.
