Tellingly, it’s in a statement to Mike Allen at Axios. Trump’s television lawyer, Jay Sekulow, says the Trump team now demands a new Special Counsel to investigate the Mueller probe and the DOJ for anti-Trump bias. This is a parallel path to the attacks on the press. What is true for Trump characterologically is true of his movement ideologically: accept no independent centers of power.
The best indications we have about the course of the Mueller probe comes from the President’s own team. They know the President and his top advisors are guilty. So they want to destroy the investigation before it destroys them. Al Hunt, hardly a bomb thrower, put it succinctly:
Equally clear is that no matter what is revealed, Trump and his allies won’t go quietly. Already, some congressional Republicans are trying to smear Mueller, the most experienced and respected special counsel in more than 40 years. If cornered, does anyone doubt that Trump will summon his core supporters to the streets?
The constant revelations create such a blur that context sometimes is overlooked. Trump and his operatives have lied repeatedly, denying that they had any contacts with Russians. Now we now know of at least 19 meetings among 31 interactions.
The blur is a central fact. The storm and chaos can obscure the central point: at every juncture since the late summer of 2016, everything the Trump team has said about its ties and connivance with Russia has been a lie. Every last time. They’re guilty. The saving grace of Trumpism is its utter lack of discordant themes. Their alliance with a authoritarian foreign power matches perfectly with their effort to install a comparable authoritarian political model here in the United States. What is true of the President personally and characterologically is true of his movement ideologically: power and domination, brook no alternative locus of power.
As Hunt says, they will not go quietly.
