Washington: President Donald Trump once again unleashed a fearsome barrage of tweets on Wednesday morning. The target was the New York Times' new report that intelligence officials have established contacts between Russian intelligence and Trump campaign officials during the campaign.
Trump attacked the news media again, railing that "the fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred." He also blasted the intelligence services, claiming that they are "illegally" giving information to the media, which, he opined, is "just like Russia."
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Trump slams 'fake media'
US President Donald Trump takes to Twitter to lash out at what he calls 'fake media', accusing them of publishing illegal information that led to the resignation of his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
This has become a pattern, in which Trump deals with setbacks by lashing out at other institutions, including ones that can function as a check on his power. When the courts blocked his immigration ban, he blasted both the courts and the news media for making us less safe, in what seemed to be designed to lay the groundwork to blame them for a future terrorist attack, a move that even some Republicans criticised for its authoritarian tendencies. This appeared to be a test run of sorts, in which Trump was experimenting with how far he could go in delegitimising the institutions that might act as a check on his power later.
But as a test run, for now, at least, it is failing. Trump's unchecked antics on multiple fronts are suddenly making him look like a very weak autocrat wannabe.
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The Times' new report is actually pretty carefully drawn. It notes that phone records and intercepted calls show "repeated contacts" between members of the Trump campaign and "senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election."
These were discovered at around the time that evidence emerged that Russia was trying to interfere in the election. The report stressed that intelligence officials did not name particular Trump campaign officials, other than Paul Manafort, and have not seen evidence of collusion ("so far") designed to influence our political process.
CNN also weighed in with a similar investigation, reporting that "high-level advisers close to" Trump were in "constant communication during the campaign with Russians known to US intelligence." CNN added that Trump had been briefed on this after the election. If that last detail is true, then it means Trump knows that intelligence officials have, indeed, concluded that this happened. Which might explain why some of his tweets Wednesday sort of function as confirmation of the stories, by blasting intel agencies for leaking classified information.
Indeed, the lashing out is beginning to look less and less fearsome, and more and more impulsively buffoonish and self-defeating. And there's a broader pattern developing here, one that undermines a key narrative about the Trump presidency, in which Trump is pursuing strategic disruption and breaking all the old rules and norms to further an unconventional presidency that is designed to render the old way of doing business irrelevant. It's obvious that all of this is now actively undermining his own designs, on multiple fronts.
Consider: The use of the White House bully pulpit by Trump and his top aides to interfere in a dispute between Nordstrom and Ivanka Trump - which seemed intended as a big middle finger to the pointy-headed ethical norms police - resulted in Republicans condemning it.
The trip to Mar-a-Lago with the Japanese prime minister - another intended sign that Trump will damn well use the presidency to enrich himself if he pleases, by turning his own resort into an official court of sorts while pocketing the profits from it - ended up getting marred by the surprise North Korea ballistic missile test. This made his administration look incompetent, chaotic, unprepared and unconcerned about basic security protocol.
The administration's handling of the Michael Flynn fiasco was a mess that was partially created by Trump himself. We now know he had been briefed three weeks ago that the Justice Department concluded Flynn had misled Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with the Russian ambassador. Yet Flynn remained, and new reporting indicates that this was driven in part because of high-level White House skepticism about the Justice Department's warnings - something that likely emanated from Trump himself.
The botched rollout of Trump's travel ban - the first high-level exercise in translating Trumpism into reality - was a legal and substantive disaster, largely because of a lack of concern over basic legal and process niceties that also reflected Trump's evolving leadership style.
Meanwhile, Wednesday's events are a reminder that the press is bearing down hard on the Russia story, which may make it harder and harder for Republicans to continue resisting a full accounting.
To be sure, Trump is getting a lot of his Cabinet nominees confirmed. It's likely that Trump and Republicans will win a lot of victories before long, ones that will be very demoralising to Democrats. It is also true that the White House has at its disposal a tremendous range of tools to take control of events and news cycles, thus turning things around. So all of this might change soon enough.
A doubling-down on Trump's worst policies, perhaps in the form of a newly implemented and then expanded "Muslim ban," or in the form of stepped-up deportations, remain real possibilities. A terrorist attack could empower Trump and lead to far worse.
But right now, Trump looks weaker, less effective and even more ridiculous than anyone might have anticipated - and it happened surprisingly quickly, too.
The Washington Post