Where things get dangerous

Andrew Sullivan
9:57 A.M.

... Four Trump campaign officials and his longtime lawyer and fixer have now pleaded to or been convicted of felonies; Trump’s now-convicted campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, faces another trial shortly; his media fixer, David Pecker, is now cooperating with authorities, and has, The Wall Street Journal reported, been granted immunity; Trump’s White House counsel talked to the special counsel’s office for 30 hours, without Trump’s knowledge, and, according to the New York Times, because he feared Trump might try to make him a fall guy for obstruction of justice; and his chief fixer for years, Michael Cohen, has every interest in telling law enforcement everything he knows about Trump’s past mafia boss–style behavior.

... we’re about to find out .. if Trump can pull off all his usual tricks, and face no serious political or legal consequences ...

Perhaps the most significant fact of the last week was that the Department of Justice believed Michael Cohen when he told them that the president of the United States directed him to commit a federal crime. We have therefore, in the view of the DOJ, a criminal president. That’s where we’ve always been with Trump, of course, going right back to his enmeshment with shady Russian financing in New York City, Florida, and Moscow. (There’s a reason Trump has not relinquished his tax returns.) But the criminality has now become text rather than subtext. And what Cohen and Manafort and Pecker know about Trump must be tempting the president to break his famous sobriety.

And how has Trump responded to these developments? ... We are told by observers of the royal court that he has raged and vented and snapped at staff. His rally in West Virginia — where he barely mentioned the cascading bad news — was relatively subdued. And at 10:10 p.m. on Wednesday night, after news broke that even David Pecker, the National Enquirer Trump propagandist, had turned on him, Trump tweeted: “NO COLLUSION — RIGGED WITCH HUNT!” He now puts the word “Justice” in quotation marks when referring to his own Department of Justice. In the last few months, he has directly attacked Robert Mueller, accusing him of shilling for Democrats. He has called for an investigation of the Clinton campaign for collusion with Russia. He has railed against the FBI for being a “disgrace” and a Democratic Party front. He is still incensed at his attorney general Jeff Sessions for his recusal in an investigation of a campaign in which he would have been a witness. The entire notion that one of his appointees actually swears loyalty to the Constitution, rather than personal fealty to Trump, is incomprehensible — no, infuriating — to him. Almost every day, we are told, the tangerine tyrant vents about Sessions, one of his very first high-profile supporters, for following the rule of law and the norms of Western justice. (Trump’s first two congressional supporters, Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter are under indictment.) ...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/andrew-sullivan-trump-is-more-dangerous-than-ever.html