Donald Trump settles for petty revenge as he circles the drain
Donald Trump, somewhere in his delusional brain, has figured out that it’s over for him. How do we know this? It’s not the fact that he’s having tantrums and throwing things behind the scenes, or that he refused to get out of bed yesterday morning. It’s that he’s now settling for the kind of petty revenge moves that you wouldn’t bother with if you thought you had a future. Two moves in particular today stand out.
First, Donald Trump canceled the White House Christmas party for the press. Sure, he regularly spreads vicious lies about the media, in the hope of distracting from their important reporting on his criminal scandals. That’s evil, but at least it’s a strategy for trying to gain the upper hand. Canceling the party is just stupid. It’s the kind of thing that could motivate reporters to stay up later at night, dig even deeper into his scandals, in the hope of breaking things open. Canceling the party is not something you do if you’re expecting to have to deal with these same reporters after the holidays.
Then Trump did a midday interview on Fox News. He spent a little time offering a dishonest and incoherent argument as to why his campaign finance felonies aren’t crimes. But he put more effort into pushing the accusation, without offering any evidence to support it, that Michael Cohen went to prison to cover for his father-in-law. In other words, Trump doesn’t think he can recover from the damage that Cohen just did to him, so instead he’s going to try to smear and/or destroy Cohen’s family.
There are only two times when petty revenge makes sense. The first is that you’re in such commanding control of everything, you can get away with being petty. The second is when you know you’re circling the drain, and you want to take your adversaries down with you. For Donald Trump, it’s clearly the latter. With his limited time remaining to try to save himself, his actions reveal that he doesn’t think he can save himself.
