Trump scandals swirling in D.C.,
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump was determined to leave his mark on Washington quickly. Now the city is leaving its bruising mark on him, with the same astonishing swiftness that has been a hallmark of his lightning-strike political career.
Trump has worn out opponents, journalists, members of Congress, foreign leaders, his staff — and now himself — with a breakneck barrage of executive actions, policy proposals and reversals, taunts, boasts and drowsyhour Twitter assaults, all meant to disrupt U.S. politics as usual.
But the president, who set a killing pace during his first four tumultuous months in office, now has been knocked off balance by an accelerating inquiry into possible collusion by his presidential campaign with Russia, as well as the backlash against his firing of the FBI director who was leading the investigation.
Ten days of shocks, kicking off with Trump’s surprise ouster of James Comey on May 9 and continuing through the revelation Friday the president had called the FBI chief a “nut job” in front of Russian officials, have left the West Wing reeling.
Aides talked about living in dread of “5 o’clock,” marking the arrival of the daily dump of damaging leaks or fresh reports of staff infighting.
What unnerves Trump and his staff most is the eerily familiar tempo of these disclosures. It is as if some unseen adversary has copied Trump’s own velocity and ferocity in an attempt to destroy him, several people close to the president said. Sources are shuttling all kinds of information about Trump to reporters at a pace the White House cannot match.
Congressional Republicans, fearful their hopes of passing tax overhaul and health care bills are vanishing, are no less alarmed. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, urged the president to conduct his affairs with less “drama,” and others are openly urging Trump to plan beyond the short time horizon of a reposted message on Twitter.
“Washington feels like a kiddie soccer game — tons of frenzy but no strategy,” said Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., who has been a vocal critic of Trump.
“All our leaders — Republicans, Democrats, Congress and the executive — need to be thinking bigger than the news cycle and planning for the policy challenges of five and 10 years in the future. Are we going to have restored public trust or further eroded it? That’s the question each of us should be asking.”
In a telling turnabout, members of Trump’s team are hoping to slow the tempo set by the president and his hard-charging chief strategist, Stephen Bannon.
They have suggested he calm down, spend less time on Twitter and avoid making decisions too quickly.
Most of his top staff members were suggesting pumping the brakes when the president was suggesting he was leaning toward quickly hiring Joseph I. Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator, as Comey’s replacement.
Among an otherwise fractious staff, there seems to be one point of unanimity: They want to buy the president, and themselves, time to maneuver, to reset and to recover from a rapid succession of devastating blows.
Trump, who lives by a hammerhead shark’s swimor-die credo, has shown no signs of slowing down.
While aides took pains to describe what they called his calm reaction to the appointment last week of Robert S. Mueller III as a special counsel in the Russia investigation, in reality he expressed anger from the start.
By the next morning, he was in a fighting mood, lashing out in a series of early-morning Twitter posts.
The Russia inquiry, he wrote, is “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
He deplored what he viewed as the hypocrisy of investigating his campaign and not “all the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration.”
For all of its perils, the Mueller investigation presents the White House with time to regain lost momentum and switch the dial back to governing.
“I believe that the appointment of Mueller is actually great news for Trump in the short and medium term,” said Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of the conservative National Review and a frequent Trump critic. “If he plays it right, he can do what Bill Clinton used to do, which is to say, ‘I want to talk about the investigation, but we have to wait and see what the investigators come up with.’ That would give him some breathing room.
“The problem, of course, is that Trump is going to be Trump.”
Many of the advantages Trump had as a fast-moving outsider candidate — namely his ability to ridicule adversaries into submission on cable or social media — aren’t nearly as useful in the presidency. Twitter is far less effective in defense than offense, and unflattering fact has much greater power than Twitter bombast to set the narrative of a presidency.
Twitter could ultimately be the means of his undoing, current and former White House officials said.
“For Trump, at this point, social media isn’t helping — it’s an accelerant,” said Bob Bauer, President Barack Obama’s first White House counsel, who was known for his caution during his 2 1/2-year West Wing tenure.
“I think the Watergate example is overused, and we don’t know where all of this will lead, but just think about the slower pace of that investigation,” Bauer said.
“It took a long time for people to know what Nixon was thinking and feeling. Then they heard those tapes,” he added. “Nixon’s fortunes declined markedly when people heard it all in real time — all those four-letter words, his disrespect for institutions, his crudity. Trump is tweeting all of this in real time. Just think about that. He’s creating tapes with those tweets.”