From the words, “just found out,” one would think that the evidence for such an extraordinary accusation was forthcoming. After all, Trump is now the president. At any moment he can call the FBI Director, the NSA director, or anyone else into his office and ask, “What is the meaning of this?” He can declassify anything he likes — logs, records, transcripts — particularly if it exposes criminal behavior by government officials. When he made his shocking charge, he was in the best possible position to back it up.
.. By Friday afternoon, Trump was acting as if the White House could repeat others’ accusations against allied intelligence agencies without consequence:
We said nothing — all we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I didn’t make any opinion on it. That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox and so you shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox, okay?
.. Maybe during his decades as a star of the New York tabloids, Trump came to believe that he could get out of trouble by making outrageous counter-accusations against his tormentors. Maybe in that realm, his belief was well founded. But the rules are different when you’re president. The commander in chief cannot publicly accuse anyone, much less his predecessor, of criminal wrongdoing and expect that the accusation won’t be investigated. The White House press secretary cannot suggest that an allied intelligence agency spied on American citizens for political reasons and expect that the rest of the world won’t sit up, take notice, and demand proof.
.. With every such unsubstantiated accusation, the administration loses a bit of credibility that it will need when it makes an accurate charge. Unless it wants to spend the next four years perceived as the boy who cried wolf, the White House should show more regard for the truth going forward.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445929/donald-trump-obama-wiretap-allegation-self-inflicted-political-wound
A 140-Character Flaw
It’s hard for a new administration to avoid controversy, but must Trump create it out of thin air?
.. What makes the furor over President Trump’s wiretapping claims so remarkable is how unnecessary it is. The flap didn’t arise from events outside of the administration’s control, nor was it a clever trap sprung by its adversaries. The president went out of his way to initiate it. He picked up his phone and tweeted allegations that he had no idea were true or not, either to distract from what he thought was a bad news cycle, or to vent, or both.
.. at the very least has diverted him and his team from much more important work on Capitol Hill, where his agenda will rise or fall. In an alternative and more conventional universe, the White House would be crowing over Judge Gorsuch’s testimony before Congress.
.. Since the wiretapping allegations, Spicer’s days have been spent in the semantics, air quotes, and epistemological gymnastics necessary to support Trump’s claims.
.. All he has to say is that he accepts his FBI director’s statement and that he doesn’t want to talk about it any more.
.. It’s hard to see why the Russians would have had to involve Trump associates in what should have been a simple two-step process: 1) hack Democratic accounts; 2) give the resulting information to WikiLeaks. But Comey’s acknowledgement of the investigation will stoke the darkest suspicions of the Left.
Why Letting Go, for Trump, Is No Small or Simple Task
aides say that Mr. Trump, who often says, “I’m, like, a really smart person” in public, is driven by a need to prove his legitimacy as president to the many critics who deem him an unworthy victor forever undercut by Hillary Clinton’s three-million-vote win in the popular vote.
.. Second, fighting back — in this case, against Mr. Obama, the F.B.I. director and members of his own party who say his claim about phone taps is false — is an important part of the president’s self-image. The two most influential role models in Mr. Trump’s youth were men who preached the twin philosophies of relentless self-promotion and the waging of total war against anyone perceived as a threat.
Mr. Trump, according to one longtime adviser, is perpetually playing a soundtrack in his head consisting of advice from his father, Fred, a hard-driving real estate developer who laid the weight of the family’s success on his son’s shoulders. Mr. Trump’s other mentor was the caustic and conniving McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn, who counseled Mr. Trump never to give in or concede error.
.. “He’s deeply, deeply insecure about how he’s perceived in the world, about whether or not he’s competent and deserves what he’s gotten,” he added. “There’s an unquenchable thirst for validation and love. That’s why he can never stay quiet, even when it would be wise strategically or emotionally to hold back.”
.. Mr. Trump’s now-infamous Twitter message on March 4 amounted to a Queens-intoned declaration that he would be no one’s victim. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process,”
.. he believes his behavior makes him look tougher, no matter what the press thinks.
Why Trump Can’t Let Go of His Bogus Wiretapping Claim
A psychology lesson from Daniel Kahneman and Richard Nixon.
But Nixon and Trump share a common personality characteristic: a hatred of losing.
.. This dominant emotion—fear and loathing of losing—has been studied
.. people facing losses act irrationally because all humans hate to lose much more than they like to win—by a factor of almost three times. It is a deep, ingrained aversion.
.. the stronger the feeling about the loss, the more irrational the behavior. Think of Bill Clinton in his affair with Monica Lewinski
.. He chose to argue in a deposition about the meaning of the verb “is,” much like Trump’s press secretary argues about the meaning of “wiretapping.”
.. Howard Hunt, wanted to plead guilty to avoid a trial (his wife had died mysteriously in a plane crash in December)
.. Nixon was looking for a way to close down any congressional investigation so he could get on with his aggressive plan to reorganize the executive branch.
.. Judge Sirica was threatening to send the defendants back before the grand jury, give them immunity and insist on their testimony. But even here, Haldeman assured Nixon, the men would take contempt rather than testify
.. “you don’t really have to have hard evidence, Bob; you’re not going to take this to court. All you have to do is put it out and the press will write the goddamn story.”
.. Nixon then speculated as to why Johnson would have bugged his plane. One reason, he submitted, was Vietnam—Nixon knew that Johnson suspected him of interfering with the peace negotiations in Paris in October 1968 through back channels (a new book by John Farrell, Richard Nixon, The Life, provides corroborating proof from recently unearthed Haldeman notes that Nixon did in fact direct his campaign to “monkey wrench” the talks). This was a very dark charge that Nixon knew could destroy his presidency.
.. that gives us a little way to get back to Johnson on that basis that, you know, we’ve got to get this [Watergate investigation] turned off, because it is going to bounce back to the other story [the plane bugging], and we can’t hold them.”
.. Was Trump’s March 4 tweetstorm simply the impetuous act of man who reacted to the latest news he read, fake or not, or was Trump acting like Nixon in a deliberate way to distract attention from the growing concern about ties between his campaign and the election-tampering Russians?