Donald Trump’s handlers have him trapped in an oblivious bubble as Robert Mueller takes him apart
In Donald Trump’s imaginary universe, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to wrap up his Trump-Russia investigation and he has no intention of pursuing Trump himself. That sounds completely ludicrous to anyone who’s been following the investigation and who knows what’s really going on. But it turns out there’s a reason Trump believes such nonsense: it’s precisely what the sycophants around him are telling him is going on.
Donald Trump’s attorney is selling his client a fantasy about how the investigation will be over soon, according to a new Vanity Fair profile (link). This means, in effect, that the attorney is no longer even trying to mount a defense for Trump, or protect him from what’s coming. In fairness to the attorney, Trump is so screwed that it’s not clear that any attempted legal strategy would get anywhere. And Trump, being a narcissist, would instinctively rather have an attorney who tells him he’s winning, than an attorney who tells him he’s losing and wants to discuss how to minimize the inevitable bad ending.
That same Vanity Fair piece paints Donald Trump’s White House advisers as working to keep Trump inside that same oblivious bubble. They surely have their reasons for that as well. If they clue him in to how screwed he is, he’s so unstable that he’s likely to erupt and lash out in a manner which brings the entire administration crashing down all the more quickly, thus putting his advisers out of work that much sooner.
In addition, Donald Trump has exposed most of these advisers to such serious crimes, such as conspiracy to obstruct justice, that they’re going to have to cut deals against him – and they know it. Better to convince him to keep his head in the sand in the meantime. Trump has surrounded himself, by choice, with the worst possible people he could find. Now they’re failing to protect him as he’s being taken down. One could argue that they deserve each other.
