Donald Trump blew it

| 11:57 pm EST January 25, 2018
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Back when the mainstream media was spending all of December pushing the entirely baseless story that Donald Trump was about to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller at any moment, Palmer Report pointed out that the window for Trump being able to oust Mueller had long ago closed. He’d have had to do it back in the summer of 2017, I argued, when no one was talking about the possibility and he could catch people off guard with the move. Now we know he tried to do precisely that – and he failed.

Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to order the Department of Justice to fire Robert Mueller back in June of last year. This was just weeks after Mueller was appointed, while the nation was still caught off guard by Trump’s shocking firing of FBI Director James Comey the month prior. Maybe Trump could have succeeded in getting rid of Mueller, and maybe not. Perhaps it would merely have resulted in the appointment of an even more powerful Special Prosecutor.

But if you’re going to make a move like this, you’ve got to be bold with it; you don’t half heartedly attempt to commit that kind of crime against the Constitution. Turns out Trump didn’t have the stomach to see it through once his own White House Counsel refused to participate and threatened to resign. That meant Trump would have had to fire McGahn, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and everyone else below him until finally getting to someone at the DOJ willing to illegally fire Mueller. Instead Trump backed down, and decided to sit back and simply let Mueller claw away at him for the next seven months.

Maybe Donald Trump would have been smart to take his shot back then. Maybe not. But the bottom line is you can’t do what Trump did, which was to commit the crime and then fail to see it through. Because he ultimately left Robert Mueller intact, he set himself up to eventually get ratted out for having tried and failed to illegally fire Mueller. Sure enough, this may be the straw that finally breaks Trump’s back. And it’s all because Trump is a hesitant and indecisive weakling who beats his own chest in public and then can’t even bring himself to do his own firing.