Donald Trump just shot himself in the foot
We’ve all seen movies where the villain realizes he’s going down no matter what, and he decides he’s going to try to take some of his designated enemies down with him. The question now is whether Donald Trump is playing that role on purpose, or whether he’s actually so stupid and deluded as to believe that what he just did is somehow going to save him.
By now you’ve heard that Donald Trump has managed to get Peter Strzok fired from the FBI. We know that Trump was behind the move, because he quickly jumped on Twitter this morning and took credit for it by gloating about it. As the day has gone on, cable news pundits on both sides have tried to assign some kind of logical motive to Trump’s actions, such as the fact that Strzok is a witness who can corroborate James Comey’s testimony. Some of the pundits have suggested that Trump is somehow winning by firing these witnesses. Uh, no. That’s not how any of this works.
Let’s be as clear as possible here: when it comes to trying to mount a criminal defense strategy for himself, Donald Trump has gained literally nothing by firing Peter Strzok. No, it doesn’t somehow prevent Strzok from testifying against him. No, it doesn’t discredit Strzok by painting him as a disgruntled witness out for revenge, both because there is contemporaneous documentation from before Trump began targeting any of these people, and because now that Trump has forced out nearly all of the witnesses against him, he can’t claim that they’re all testifying simply because they’re disgruntled.
Donald Trump did change a few things today, however. For one thing, he’s freed up the now-unemployed Peter Strzok to speak out against him. Trump has also exposed himself to even more eventual criminal charges for obstruction of justice and witness intimidation. Trump has shot himself in the foot today, and he’s gained nothing, beyond the visceral satisfaction of ruining the career of a guy who didn’t like him very much.
