Understanding Trumpese and Trump thought, by Josh Marshall

There’s one nugget in yesterday’s Times story which I think is being taken as – and perhaps was even written as – an example of Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s naïveté in thinking the Russia story had been put to rest with the firing of General Michael Flynn. Pretty clearly, though, it’s not an example of that at all. It’s a good illustration of something very different.

Here’s the passage …

    “This Russia thing is all over now because I fired Flynn,” Mr. Trump said over lunch that day, according to a new book by Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and a longtime Trump ally.

    Mr. Christie was taken aback. “This Russia thing is far from over,” Mr. Christie wrote that he told Mr. Trump, who responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.”

    Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who was also at the lunch, chimed in, according to Mr. Christie’s book: “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

If I’m reading this part of the article correctly, we’re supposed to understand that Trump just didn’t get how serious a situation he was in. Christie – more politically savvy, a former federal prosecutor and the target of a broad-ranging investigation – knew better. I don’t think that’s what was happening here at all.

Flynn is a bigger deal in this whole tangle of bad-acting than he has seemed for the last year or so. But from the perspective of two years later, Flynn seems like almost a minor player in the whole Russia affair. There are probably ten more damning revelations that have come out since then. Trump and Kushner knew, at a minimum, about the Trump Tower meeting, almost countless meetings other Trump associates had had with Russian officials, all the things we’ve learned about Manafort and Cohen and Stone. Even if you buy the Trump line that none of this has proven ‘collusion’ or that none of it is a crime anyway, when Trump and Kushner were sitting there with Christie they knew that Flynn was just the tip of the iceberg.

So what’s happening here?

Trump knows there’s a lot more there. But he’s trying to convince an ally (and to some level himself) that everything is settled, there’s nothing more there, done and done. Put simply, Trump knows there’s a mountain of other evidence. These anecdotes get put up sometimes as evidence that Trump isn’t really hiding anything maybe. It’s just his hyper-aggressive tactics that get him into trouble or not ‘knowing how things work.’ Not likely. It’s an aggressive attempt both to convince someone like Christie and to use bogus claims as an assertion of power.

Here’s a different but I think related example. In Andrew McCabe’s account of his first meeting with President after James Comey’s firing, Trump’s main focus was telling McCabe how everyone at the FBI couldn’t stand Comey and was grateful to Trump for firing him. From everything we know this was clearly false. McCabe was in as good a position as anyone to know this was false. I give the President the respect of not assuming he’s an infant. He knows this. He moves from an aggressive statement of things that McCabe knows are not true and – just as critically – that McCabe knows Trump knows are not true. It is an assertion of power more than an effort to convince. Then Trump moves to the real ask: “I heard you were part of the resistance.”

In some ways this is the most revealing part of McCabe’s account. Trump pushes a blatantly false storyline to McCabe in a private meeting, one the point of which appears to be its very falsity, an aggressive dominating statement that is the exact contrary to the reality of the situation. Then he tries to put McCabe on the defensive by suggesting he’s part of the resistance. The whole episode seems calculated to test whether McCabe will accept his version of reality. You demonstrate your loyalty by accepting non-facts.

Even at this late date in our collective experience with Donald Trump I hear claims about these sorts of episodes suggesting that Trump is just comically misinformed or only believes what he wants to believe or what the last person told him. It is something quite different. Information, claims, facts, portrayals are for Trump all parts of power transactions, getting people to accept his power, his will, his versions of events. In a way we know this all first hand, with his constant public denials about every new Russia revelation. No collusion! Witch hunt! etc. It is important to see that this is the way he operates in private too. It’s all of a piece.