In fact, White House lawyers tried to mute the President’s reaction to the Mueller indictments. Repeatedly, they tried to tell him that the investigation was not over, and that the risks remained for him or for his team. The President didn’t want to hear it and turned to his favorite informal advisers: the staff of Fox News, which declared Trump exonerated. A little more than a year into this presidency, many White House staffers have learned not to try to fight it.
En route to Florida and then once holed up at his club, the President spent hours watching the coverage of himself. Some of the commentary suggested, perhaps wrongly, that Trump won only because Russians put their thumbs on the scales. With sons Donald Jr. and Eric sitting with him, the President turned angry. He roared about defeated rival Hillary Clinton, his perceived biases in the media, the criticism from the teenaged survivors of the school shooting, and why his tax cuts weren’t getting more attention. (At the White House, officials lamented over the weekend that Trump was crushing those good economic headlines with his outbursts. Polls showed the tax cuts’ popularity rising after being underwater upon passage. Shortly after landing back at the White House, he tweeted about an economy “looking very good, in my opinion, even better than anticipated.”)
Trying to mitigate that situation only made things worse. Knowing the President’s fondness for Fox, the White House booked spokesmen to try to direct Trump toward a little less fanciful readings of the indictments.
They didn’t entirely succeed.
On Friday night, spokesman Raj Shah told Tucker Carlson that the indictments said the Russians were trying to “sow confusion” in America without favoring one candidate over another. (The indictment specifically says the Russians sought to hurt Clinton and to promote Trump.)
Trump used a similar line in a tweet Sunday morning.
Then, on Saturday, the White House sent Hogan Gidley on “Fox and Friends,” where he turned on Democrats and the reporters covering this story. “There are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians, and that’s the Democrats and the mainstream media,” Gidley said in a moment that left many Republicans scratching their heads. (“The more I think about a White House official — not a Fox commentator or an RNC hack — saying this, the more appalled I am. He should be fired,” responded former Dan Quayle chief of Staff Bill Kristol. Said former CIA chief Michael Hayden: “Good God almighty.”)
Quickly, Russian-backed propaganda arms raced to amplify Gidley’s comments. RT blanketed its space with Gidley’s rhetoric. (“You secured a speaking gig at the next RT gala,” snarked former Obama-era National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.) A White House besieged by questions of collusion with Russia seemed to dovetail perfectly with Russian spin.
The problems were only getting started. The President changed his Twitter picture to one of him flashing a smile and thumbs-up — taken while the President was visiting a hospital where victims of the school shooting were recovering. Other social media accounts featured a grinning President standing next to a young woman in a hospital bed and her medical equipment.
White House advisers convinced Trump to shelve his golf plans for Saturday as teenagers fought for their lives a short drive away. The optics were bad from the night before, and he’d make things worse by putting on Saturday. Trump relented, reluctantly, out of respect. But that may have hurt the White House even more. The extra day in the pressure cooker made things worse.
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