The Daily 202: Wiretapping allegations accomplished what Trump wanted but may backfire bigly [View all]

[orangecrush]

THE BIG IDEA: It is easy to pooh-pooh Donald Trump’s predawn Saturday tweetstorm – accusing Barack Obama of the worst political crimes since Watergate while offering no evidence – as an undisciplined rant from someone who has long embraced conspiracy theories.

That neither gives the president enough credit nor reflects the gravity of his unfounded accusations.

It is past time to dispense with the fiction that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to distract us. And, at least this weekend, he succeeded.

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ALWAYS ATTACK, NEVER APOLOGIZE

-- Trump’s approach to crisis management continues to be guided by the Roy Cohn playbook. “This is McCarthyism!” Trump said, as he attacked Obama for supposedly wiretapping him, on Saturday. There was great irony to this. Cohn, after all, was Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during the early 1950s. Two decades later, he became one of Trump’s biggest mentors during a formative phase of his life.

-- Cohn’s creed was to always be on the attack, to counter-punch whenever punched and to never apologize. Never, ever, ever apologize. He believed that you never yield an inch, even if you’re in the wrong, because your opponents will take a mile.

-- “The man who showed Trump how to exploit power and instill fear” is how The Post’s Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg described him in a story last June: “Trump was a brash scion of a real estate empire, a young developer anxious to leave his mark on New York. Cohn was a legendary New York fixer, a ruthless lawyer in the hunt for new clients. They came together by chance one night at Le Club, a hangout for Manhattan’s rich and famous. Trump introduced himself to Cohn, who was sitting at a nearby table, and sought advice: How should he and his father respond to Justice Department allegations that their company had systematically discriminated against black people seeking housing? ‘My view is tell them to go to hell,’ Cohn said, ‘and fight the thing in court.’ It was October 1973 and the start of one of the most influential relationships of Trump’s career.”

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/03/06/daily-202-wiretapping-allegations-accomplished-what-trump-wanted-but-may-backfire-bigly/58bca8bde9b69b1406c75d42/

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