In a recent article from Vanity Fair, the publication that first alerted us to the diminutive size of Donald Trump’s hands, reporter Gabriel Sherman outlines the reason the President may be overworking his undersized thumbs this weekend, and once again, it has to do with loyalty — Trump’s number one vice.
According to the report, the President’s mood has been getting darker and darker as he finds out the extent to which he’s been “betrayed” — that is to say, how much has been revealed to Robert Mueller — by White House counsel Don McGahn. The problem for Trump is that he had mistakenly assumed that McGahn works for him, rather than for the office of the presidency, a mistake he seems to have made with many of the aides and staffers he’s attempted to bind from speaking with non-disclosure agreements.
A lawyer, of course, would never sign an NDA, but Trump truly seems to have been in the dark about the nature of McGahn’s position at the White House.
All of that, however, is apparent from Trump’s Twitter feed over the weekend and into today, where he seems completely comfortable laying bare his anger and misgivings in a way he thinks may be indecipherable to his base, but which even psychoanalysts with the comfiest armchairs pick apart with relative ease.
And it’s no secret that Trump is now frantic over the fact that his son Don Jr. seems to be a target of the investigation, now that evidence has surfaced that literally everyone knew everything they denied knowing about the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin lawyer, with the Trump campaign in search of “dirt” on their opponent Hillary Clinton.
What’s new from the report is just who Trump has decided to blame this time, and it’s someone that VF says McGahn “hates with the intensity of a thousand burning suns”: Trump’s newest lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. The logic was that if Jeff Sessions — who advisers say is possibly Trump’s most frequent focus of anger and vitriol — hadn’t recused himself, there would be no Special Counsel.
According to Trump advisers inside the White House — Sherman’s sources, of course, not those of DC Tribune — the President was heard shouting at his lawyer:
It’s your fault! I offered you attorney general, but you insisted on being secretary of state. Had I picked you none of this would be happening.”
The reference, of course, is to Rudy having wanted the top State Department spot that eventually went to oil king Rex Tillerson in return for favors the magnate had done for Trump in the past.
But it underlines the fact that Trump still thinks there’s nothing to be sorry about except having gotten caught.
Featured image via screen capture
