Politico notes the latest President Trump maneuver:
To hear President Donald Trump and his allies tell it, the federal investigators who spent the past two years investigating the president are about to go down. …
They’re expecting all of this to come from a spate of Justice Department probes reviewing the full scope of the Trump-Russia investigation, which culminated earlier this year with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
“This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said during a recent Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. “This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”
These hyperbolic expectations have legal experts, even some who are often sympathetic to the president, skeptical that the final product can equal the Trump-fueled rhetoric.
Keep the base worked up, deepen their paranoia, and don’t let them think. Don’t give them a reason to read the Mueller report. Use the same tactic to attack your enemies as a warning to never attack again.
The resentment of the Trump base, brought on by the rapid and sometimes illicit, in their eyes, changes sought by progressives, not to mention progressives’ attitudes, and deepened by far-right pundits building a political movement, makes them quite vulnerable to taking these charges seriously, even if Trump’s allies express doubt that they’ll amount to anything. Why? Because he’s fighting back, and that’s what the base hungers after most. The fact that he’s clumsy and ineffective is immaterial because they never learn that he’s ineffective; the news doesn’t reach them, or is swallowed up by the next controversy.
All Trump has to do is keep them convinced he’s winning. If a recession hits, then he may have a problem. That’s why he’s trying to cast aspersions on Fed Chair Powell, even though a recession is the result of many factors, most beyond the President’s control.
