Donald Trump stunned into silence as everything blows up in his face
For a few hours there today, Donald Trump seemed to think he had a handle on this day. He’d managed to manipulate useful idiot Kanye West into making a series of controversial pro-Trump tweets, which got everything from “Kanye” to “MAGA” trending on Twitter. It’s not as if Kanye was going to win Trump any new supporters, but it did serve as a distraction – at least for awhile. Then everything blew up in Trump’s face.
Trump and his people engineered the Kanye controversy today to try to distract from what they knew was coming: Trump’s “attorney” Michael Cohen was about to plead the Fifth Amendment in civil court, for fear his testimony would doom him in criminal court. As bad of a development as this is for Trump, it looks even worse in the court of public opinion. Trump thought he could distract people from it. He soon saw otherwise.
Immediately after the news broke, “Fifth Amendment” began trending on Twitter. Fittingly, it was trending directly above “MAGA.” So much for the hope of distracting anyone from the news. Trump had posted two different boastful tweets about Kanye West during the course of Kanye’s meltdown. But sure enough, the minute the Michael Cohen news broke, Trump went silent – and he hasn’t been heard from since.
So what’s the moral of the story here? First, don’t buy into Donald Trump’s cheap distractions. If you’ve been paying attention to Trump’s antics all along, you knew that the Kanye thing was an attempt at distracting you from something far more important that was about to happen. Second, Trump’s distractions aren’t doing him nearly as much good these days as they used to. Then again, when your attorney is pleading the Fifth, you’re past the point of being able to cover up manure with other manure.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report