Things are getting quite hairy at the White House. Apparently, senior adviser Stephen Miller reckoned that he needed to perform a cover-up before he went on national television this past Sunday. He seems to have sprayed on hair-in-a-canister to camouflage his glabrous head. Like many of the moves this administration has made, Miller’s gambit only drew more attention to what he wished to conceal.
The Washington Post observed, ‘it emanated from Miller’s head like a physical manifestation of his personality — a follicle’d inferiority complex that was suddenly in charge of creating the nation’s policies.’
Since then, the White House has run into a fresh spate of bad news. Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn showed up in a Washington, DC courthouse today for his long-waited sentencing, only to be upbraided by Judge Emmet Sullivan for having arguably committed nothing less than treason, though Sullivan later walked back his comment, saying ‘I was just trying to determine the benefit and the generosity of the government.’
A chastened Flynn has pledged to cooperate even further with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team in exchange for deferring sentencing. It’s starting to look as though, for all his ‘lock her up’ bravado at the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, Flynn will do pretty much anything to avoid the hoosegow himself.
Then there is the shuttering of the Trump foundation, another source of criminal behavior by the president and his entourage. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a suit in June alleging ‘persistently illegal conduct.’ Her own persistence has disclosed what she is calling ‘a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.’
It isn’t simply that Trump was exploiting the Foundation to engage in fiscal shenanigans, including buying art for one of his golf clubs. It’s that the pillars of the world that Trump constructed to support his gilded life are crumbling. The Trump organization itself is under investigation: CFO Allen Weisselberg is talking to Mueller. So is Flynn. Michael Cohen, his former fixer, has flipped. Paul Manafort is in jail. And so on.
Gabriel Sherman reports that the White House now resembles a nuthouse. Trump apparently wants a purge of his outgoing chief of staff John Kelly’s aides. Meanwhile, Mueller preoccupies his thoughts. According to Sherman, ‘Last night, Mueller was a topic of discussion among the prominent members of Trumpworld, including Don Jr., who gathered at the Trump International Hotel for a birthday party for RNC co-chair candidate Tommy Hicks. “People are speculating that the secret witness in the D.C. court is Don Jr.,” one attendee said.’ Last week Mueller cleared out the entire fifth floor of a DC federal courthouse to mask a mysterious witness appearing before a grand jury — speculation is that it was either Don Jr. or Jared Kushner. There’s now rumors that Mueller will not seek indictments against Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Ivanka in exchange for daddy’s resignation.
Most recently, Trump has backed down on his boast that he would embrace a government shutdown if the Democrats refused to cough up $5 billion for a border wall. Border, shmorder, disorder. Perhaps it’s Trump who’s in the bunker, walled off from reality.
