Sarah Huckabee Sanders throws up her hands after Donald Trump’s day from hell

| 7:19 pm EDT August 21, 2018
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Donald Trump is having such a historically and catastrophically bad day, there’s almost no way for him or anyone in his camp to respond. His campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted today on eight felony counts. His fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight other felony counts, and then named Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. Trump’s response this evening was meek, and Rudy Giuliani’s response was even meeker. But surely Trump’s White House Press Secretary would have something to say, right?

Sarah Huckabee Sanders officially speaks for the Donald Trump White House. But today she wasn’t the least bit interested in doing any speaking. Instead she merely issued this statement to the media: “On Paul Manafort: Refer you to the President’s comments just now from West Virginia. On Michael Cohen: Refer you to the President’s outside counsel.” Wow. That’s even lamer than Trump’s “nothing to do with me” rant about Manafort, and Rudy’s weird lie about Trump not having been incriminated by Cohen.

Donald Trump and his people seem to have no idea how to respond to what’s happened to them today. That’s somewhat remarkable, considering that legal observers all expected Paul Manafort to be convicted on felony charges this week, and most political observers were expecting Michael Cohen to cut a plea deal eventually. It’s not as if Trump and his team didn’t know this was coming.

Perhaps Trump and his team didn’t know that both disasters were going to happen on the same day, and therefore couldn’t figure out how to distract from them both. Or perhaps this means that Team Trump truly has no idea how to deal with any of this anymore. Trump’s strategy of late has consisted of little more than creating one bombastic distraction after another, in the hope of keeping everyone too confused to figure out how guilty he is. But on the day Trump needed a distraction more than anyone has ever needed one, thus far he and his people have come up entirely empty.