Tracking Trump: a storm for Manafort, and a volley of post-attack tweets
Trump’s ex-campaign chair appeared in court charged with money laundering, while after eight people died in New York, Trump was quick to speak out
Each week Trump seems to make more news than most presidents do in a lifetime. The Guardian is keeping track of it all in this series, every Saturday
Last weekend
Attempting to muddy the waters ahead of special counsel Robert Mueller’s expected first indictments in his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion by the future president’s team, Donald Trump tried to turn the focus on Hillary Clinton last weekend.
Trump attacked his former election rival’s reported role in paying for research that led to the Steele dossier on links between Trump and Russia, her supposed contribution (much less plausible) to a deal that allowed the Russian nuclear energy agency to acquire a controlling stake in a Canadian company mining US uranium, and other past Clinton controversies. “DO SOMETHING!” he cried.
The president did take time out to resume his occasional role as a TV and theatre critic, bashing leftwing filmmaker Michael Moore for his recent Broadway show, which Trump called a “TOTAL BOMB”. But in a rare show of self-awareness, the president conceded that sending that tweet was “not at all presidential”. Baby steps ...
Also, a cyclist gave him the finger.
Monday
On Monday Mueller’s first charges were announced: as expected, money-laundering accusations against Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and associate Rick Gates, but also a guilty plea from ex-foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who lied to investigators about attempts to arrange a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin.
It’s hard to say which case is more damaging to Trump. The Papadopoulos plea shows another attempt – similar to the one made by Donald Trump Jr – to gain information on Clinton from apparent Russian sources, undermining again repeated claims there was no contact between the Trump campaign and Moscow. But the Manafort charges shows that Mueller is ranging far and wide in his investigation and is happy to prosecute financial crimes only tangentially related to Russian hacking. That may worry Trump, who has said that if the special counsel starts to delve into his finances he would consider it “a violation”.
Meanwhile chief of staff John Kelly attempted to outdo his boss in inflammatory race-baiting, claiming a lack of ability to compromise led to the civil war and saying it was wrong to “take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back ... and apply it back then”. As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out, only by excluding black people can you claim most Americans thought slavery was right during the civil war.
Tuesday
Trump attempted to distance himself from Papadopoulos on Tuesday, calling him a “young, low level volunteer named George” who “few people knew”.
Leaving aside the suspicion that Trump had gone out of his way to avoid trying to spell Papadopoulos’ surname, his main point was somewhat belied by an interview with the Washington Post in March 2016 in which he called the adviser an “excellent guy” and a picture he posted on Instagram captioned “meeting with my national security team” in which Papadopoulos can be seen four seats to his right.
Later in the week Trump claimed he could not remember much about the meeting. Regular readers might recall Trump’s boast last week that he had “one of the great memories of all time”.
Wednesday
In sharp contrast to his reaction to the Las Vegas mass shooting a month earlier, after which he said any policy responses would have to wait until “time goes by”, Trump’s immediate response to the terrorist attack on a Manhattan bike path which killed eight people on Tuesday was to call for more “extreme vetting” of newcomers to the US and an end to the green card lottery which allows people from under-represented parts of the world to apply to live in America. But there was a lot of blame to go round – and some of it Trump sent the way of Chuck Schumer, one of the stricken city’s Democratic senators.
Thursday
Having called the US justice system a “joke” and a “laughing stock” on Wednesday and mulled sending suspect Sayfullo Saipov to the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Trump reversed course on the latter on Thursday but pushed repeatedly instead for Saipov to receive the death penalty. Experts warned that the president’s comments might threaten Saipov’s chances of a fair trial and be used by the defence in the suspect’s favour. He went on to claim on Friday that the US had been attacking Isis “10 times harder” in revenge for the New York attack – something not supported by available military data.
Friday
Getting up early to start a 10-day trip to Asia, the president fired off a few more tweets – once his Twitter account was back up and running, that is – attempting again to refocus attention away from his own Russia woes towards stories about the Democrats. Seizing upon claims in a new book by former acting chair of the Democratic national committee Donna Brazile that the Democratic primary process favoured Clinton over Bernie Sanders, Trump called for the Justice Department and FBI to investigate and noted: “I always felt I would be running and winning against Bernie Sanders, not Crooked H, without cheating, I was right.”
Ah well. There’s always 2020.
