"The Strategy Was to Try and Do Something Really Big": Trump Wanted to Nuke Rosenstein

“The Strategy Was to Try and Do Something Really Big”: Trump Wanted to Nuke Rosenstein to Save Kavanaugh’s Bacon
But Trump allies are privately imploring him to cut Kavanaugh loose to save Republicans’ electoral chances in the midterms.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/09/trump-wanted-to-nuke-rosenstein-to-save-kavanaughs-bacon?mbid=social_twitter

At the beginning of one of the most consequential weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, an enormous smoke bomb was detonated in the news cycle when Axios, deeply wired in Trump’s West Wing, reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had “offered to resign.” Quickly, a head-spinning array of conflicting accounts were put forth: had he been fired? Was he heading to the White House to be fired—or was he going to a regularly scheduled meeting? Finally, Sarah Huckabee Sanders brought a measure of clarity by tweeting that whatever was going to happen to Rosenstein would happen on Thursday, when the president returned from New York.

For all the morning’s madness, there may have been an underlying logic. Over the weekend, as Brett Kavanaugh’s prospects appeared increasingly imperiled, Trump faced two tactical options, both of them fraught. One was to cut Kavanaugh loose. But he was also looking for ways to dramatically shift the news cycle away from his embattled Supreme Court nominee. According to a source briefed on Trump’s thinking, Trump decided that firing Rosenstein would knock Kavanaugh out of the news, potentially saving his nomination and Republicans’ chances for keeping the Senate. “The strategy was to try and do something really big,” the source said. The leak about Rosenstein’s resignation could have been the result, and it certainly had the desired effect of driving Kavanaugh out of the news for a few hours.

Rosenstein still has his job, at least until Thursday, leaving open multiple possibilities regarding the underlying reality. Regardless, Trump has wanted to fire Rosenstein from the moment he read the New York Times article that reported Rosenstein had discussed secretly tape-recording Trump and rallying Cabinet secretaries to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. (Rosenstein has denied the account.) Some outside advisers, including Sean Hannity, have cautioned that the Times story was a trap to get Trump to fire Rosenstein and trigger a Saturday Night Massacre-like crisis that, however temporarily successful, would leave Democrats holding almost all the cards.