What we learned from the Trump family’s panic session at Camp David

| 6:04 pm EDT June 4, 2018
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This weekend, Donald Trump and most of his family decided to hunker down at Camp David. We say “hunker down” because whenever the Trumps are merely looking for yet another vacation, they head to one of their own properties. Trump only goes to Camp David, a place he’s admitted he doesn’t care for, whenever he and his people are planning some kind of serious strategy session. Considering what all is playing out right now, it’s fair to characterize this as a panic session. So what did we learn from it?

The Trumps see Melania’s disappearance as a big problem: For three and a half weeks, Donald Trump and the White House have been acting like Melania’s vanishing act isn’t a big deal. They’ve shrugged it off and fed us one lazy lie after another until it became a big scandal. Now that Trump and his family have had their big pow-wow this weekend, suddenly the White House says that Melania will attend a Gold Star ceremony at the White House this evening, which will be conveniently closed to the media. Someone in the family is trying to take control of this spiraling-out-of-control narrative.

When the dotard is away, the buffoons will play: With Donald Trump off the grid this weekend, Rudy Giuliani hit the Sunday morning talk show circuit and tried to scapegoat Trump’s other defense attorney, Jay Sekulow. Looks like Rudy is trying to take advantage of Trump’s absence to get rid of a colleague he doesn’t care for. Trump’s henchmen spend at least as much time trying to destroy each other as they do trying to destroy America, and Trump doesn’t always seem to be in control of them.

Eric Trump might be the only smart one: There’s little doubt that the Trump family panic session included discussions about how to obstruct justice in the Trump-Russia scandal, whether it be the newly leaked confidential memo, or how to get Jared Kushner off the hook now that Robert Mueller is firmly targeting him. Did the rest of the family leave Eric out of the Camp David trip because they think he’s too dumb to add anything? Or was Eric smart enough to stay away, because he didn’t want to be on the hook for obstruction of justice charges?