Gabriel Sherman, one of the best reporters on what happens inside the White House (and inside Fox News) has just published a shocking report at Vanity Fair exposing President Trump as having concocted a heist of the headlines Monday morning.
Amid flurries of reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had resigned, only to be countered that he was going to the White House to force the president (via his chief of staff) to fire him, and then that the White House meeting was a regularly scheduled event, and then Rosenstein would meet Thursday with Trump, the media took its focus off the three or possibly four allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, of sexual assault and /or rape.
Behind the dizzying stories apparently was one person: Donald Trump.
“Trump decided that firing Rosenstein would knock Kavanaugh out of the news,” Sherman reports, “potentially saving his nomination and Republicans’ chances for keeping the Senate.”
“The strategy was to try and do something really big,” a source tells Sherman.
Sherman adds that “in private, Trump is growing increasingly frustrated by being mired in a deteriorating political situation beyond his control. On Monday morning, a Republican briefed on Trump’s thinking said the president has been considering pulling Kavanaugh’s nomination.”
Trump is reportedly very worried, and his “allies are imploring him to cut Kavanaugh loose for the sake of saving Republicans’ electoral chances in the midterms. The argument these advisers are making is that if Kavanaugh’s nomination fails, demoralized Republicans will stay home in November, and Democrats will take the House and the Senate and initiate impeachment proceedings. The end result: Trump will be removed from office.”
“The stakes are that high,” the source said. Another Republican adviser told me: “Trump is very worried now, and is finally waking up that it’s the end of his presidency if he loses the Senate.”
Bottom line, Rosenstein’s days are probably numbered after this charade, but the fact remains that the President of the United states orchestrated a media coup and put a top Dept. of Justice official’s neck on the chopping block, just to change headlines.