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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"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 Kavanaughs 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 Trumps presidency, an enormous smoke bomb was detonated in the news cycle when Axios, deeply wired in Trumps 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 firedor 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 mornings madness, there may have been an underlying logic. Over the weekend, as Brett Kavanaughs 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 Trumps 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 Rosensteins 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.
empedocles
(15,751 posts)TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)talk the Orange Dimpledick out of it, but he listens to Hannity.
displacedtexan
(15,696 posts)It's a world gone mad when Hannity is useful.
C_U_L8R
(45,021 posts)What did Trump accomplish with his kerfuffle?
He's just digging more holes deeper.
CrispyQ
(36,525 posts)People who still support this train wreck deserve our contempt.
Gothmog
(145,567 posts)mercuryblues
(14,539 posts)I thought the prevailing purpose of the anonymous NYT editorial last week was to let us know that there are adults in the WH keeping trump from his most destructive impulses under control? Yet here we are.