Donald Trump Is Running Out of Fall Guys

http://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-is-running-out-of-fall-guys

Donald Trump Is Running Out of Fall Guys
By Jay Willis
a day ago


Donald Trump's decision to turn on Rod Rosenstein, his deputy attorney general, shows how fast he's running out of friends—and excuses.

Two days ago, in celebration of his seventy-first birthday, Donald Trump received a coffee-stained birthday card from his wife, novelty oversized plane tickets to Russia from his opponents, and a news report that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is probing whether senior White House officials may have committed financial crimes. Oh, that and Trump is now personally under investigation for obstruction of justice. Law enforcement types are just terrible at picking out birthday presents.

Trump, as is his Pavlovian wont, immediately lashed out incoherently on Twitter, asserting that the inquiries into his alleged misconduct amount to a "witch hunt" conducted by "very bad and conflicted people." His problem, though, is that as president, he doesn't have the authority to fire a special prosecutor—that task instead falls to the man who tapped Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who became the FBI's point person on the investigation after Rosenstein's superior, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, recused himself because he couldn't stop remembering clandestine meetings with high-level Russian officials that he had mysteriously failed to disclose.

Perhaps sensing that the President's ire would soon be directed squarely at him, Rosenstein pushed back at the Post's reporting, releasing a bizarre statement. It basically amounts to a hostage video in written format:

Link to tweet

Department of Justice sources quickly denied that the White House had ordered Rosenstein to do this, but they declined to say so on the record, which means that the same law enforcement organization that gravely cautioned the American public not to believe anonymous statements attributed to unnamed government officials is now clarifying its position using anonymous statements attributed to unnamed government officials and holy hell my head hurts.

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As the investigations into his conduct widen in scope and seemingly close in on all sides, Donald Trump's panicked, shoot-from-the-hip responses are exposing him as a paranoid loner who is running dangerously low on friends he can trust, enemies he can demonize, and expendable associates he can stab in the back to buy himself another temporary reprieve. There is no chessboard, no master plan, no carefully-curated strategy unfolding before our eyes at which we'll one day look back and marvel at its genius. Donald Trump is a wounded animal backed into a corner, lashing out blindly and impotently at everything that moves. He is a President of the United States under investigation for obstruction of justice who wants the special prosecutor fired, and who has run out of patience with the man who possesses the authority to do so. I feel like I've seen this scenario before, and I don't feel like it ended particularly well.