Here’s who’s really in charge of Donald Trump’s disastrous legal team

| 9:38 pm EDT May 7, 2018
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Over the past week we’ve watched Donald Trump’s legal defense team morph from a quiet disaster into a very loud one. Ty Cobb, who rarely interacted with the media except when he was speaking too loudly in restaurants, resigned. Rudy Giuliani became the new public face of Trump’s legal team, even as Emmet Flood quietly signed on in the background. The question ever since has been who’s really in charge of this sinking ship. Now we have our answer.

When Trump went silent on Twitter over the weekend, plenty of people began asking if perhaps he was reluctantly following the advice of Flood, a serious attorney with specific experience in impeachment cases. But that never quite made sense. If Flood had that kind of control over Trump, a train wreck like Giuliani wouldn’t be on the team at all. Yesterday Giuliani told the media that he was the one who convinced Trump to go silent on Twitter, so Rudy’s voice could be heard more loudly. This morning Trump defied that by resuming his frantic tweets about the criminal investigation into his scandals.

So let’s try to parse this. The mere fact that Rudy Giuliani is on the team is proof that Emmet Flood isn’t running the show. The fact that Donald Trump is now talking about firing Rudy is proof that Rudy isn’t running the show. We know Trump’s only longtime attorney, Jay Sekulow, isn’t running the show because he has no relevant experience when it comes to the kinds of charges Trump is facing.

Most importantly, if Donald Trump were running the show, he wouldn’t have spent the past two weeks letting Rudy Giuliani and Emmet Flood each push forward with defense strategies that are fully incompatible with each other. The bottom line: no one is in control of Trump’s legal team. The Titanic is steering itself into the iceberg.