Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any more absurd…
Earlier this week, The New York Times published an interview with Donald Trump that found the President throwing anyone and everyone he could think of under the bus, including his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who was very nearly forced to resign after Trump claimed he never would have hired him had he known he was going to recuse himself from the Russia probe.
Trump also took the opportunity to threaten Robert Mueller, whose investigation the President implicitly warned would be shut down if the special counsel crossed the “red line” into the Trump family finances.
The very next day, Bloomberg reported that Mueller is now doing precisely what Trump warned him not to do – expanding the investigation into the finances of Trump’s associates.
That marked a serious escalation and it of course comes on top of the mushrooming scandal that is Donald Trump Jr.’s now infamous meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, a meeting which we later learned was attended by a former Soviet spy. We also now know that Veselnitskaya once represented KGB successor FSB.
You can read a full post-mortem of the Trump NY Times interview here, and as for Trump Jr., you should note that he and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort narrowly avoided being subpoenaed for public hearing next week, after cutting a deal with the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee to provide records to the panel and to be privately interviewed before any public session.
As a reminder, the House intelligence committee is set to interview Jared Kushner on Tuesday with regard to Russian election interference and Kushner is being interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday.
Oh, and Sean Spicer resigned on Friday.
Ok, well fast forward to Saturday and Trump has taken the Twitter tirades up another notch still.
Now, he says it’s The New York Times‘ fault that ISIS leader Bakr al-Baghdadi isn’t actually dead.
And yes, I am serious.
Do note that this sounds so much like Erdogan that Turkish scholars are probably having conniption fits.
Also recall that Baghdadi dies and comes back to life all the time. And the most recent reports of his demise (originally disseminated by the Kremlin) have now been thrown into doubt.
On Friday night, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he thinks Baghdadi is still among the living, although frankly it isn’t clear why he cares because if you know anything about ISIS you know that Baghdadi is, at this point, more a liability for the group than he is an asset.
But back to Trump. He wasn’t done.
There was an attack on Jeff Bezos and the “Amazon Washington Post”:
There was Hillary, the uranium, Podesta, and a misspelling of the word “counsel”:
There was a reminder that he can pardon himself if he wants to:
And, inexplicably, there was this about an aircraft carrier:
Grade A “covfefe”, America.
Enjoy.
