What the Meadows texts
reveal about Trump's secret life
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One myth of the Trump
years has been that his crimes and the crimes of his Band of Crazy Compatriots
were committed in plain sight. Trump’s rants at his rallies were
remarkable, we were told again and again, because he gets up there and
tells you what he’s going to do. Some pundits thought it started
during the 2016 campaign, when Trump would come right out and encourage his
followers to beat up anti-Trump protesters who occasionally showed up among
them. In Iowa, he told a rally, “If you see somebody getting ready to
throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, seriously. Just knock the
hell out of…I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I
promise. I promise.”
For a time, Trump’s
in-your-face rabble-rousing and encouragement of violence passed for
honesty. He’ll say things other people think but won’t come out
and say, went the thinking. When two of his top campaign aides
got in trouble with the FBI, Trump “sent private and public messages to Flynn
encouraging him to stay strong and conveying that the President still cared
about him before he began to cooperate with the government," Special
Counsel Robert Mueller found in his final report. “With respect to Manafort…the
President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a
pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the
President did not want Manafort to 'flip' and cooperate with the
government," Mueller found.
Former Michigan U.S.
Attorney Barbara McQuade, a frequent legal commentator on MSNBC, wrote a major
piece for the Daily Beast entitled, “Trump may be committing obstruction of
justice in plain sight.”
“Trump…seems to be
attempting to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation in broad daylight.
Why? It may be a deliberate strategy to maintain deniability. By using Twitter
and public remarks to intimidate investigators and delegitimize law
enforcement, Trump may be attempting to negate the ability of prosecutors to
prove an essential element of an obstruction charge: corrupt intent. If he were
intending to obstruct justice, the strategy goes, would he have done so
publicly? Of course not! Therefore, he lacks the requisite intent to commit the
crime.”
It happened again
during the Ukraine scandal. Trump came right out and told Ukrainian
President Zelensky that all he needed was an “investigation” of Joe Biden and
his son Hunter, and everything would be peachy. He’d release the weapons
promised to Ukraine’s army, and all would be well. Efforts to impeach
Trump for “high crimes and misdemeanors” related to the Ukraine scandal came to
naught, at least in part because he had been seen directing the actions of his
co-conspirator Giuliani “in plain sight,” so how could that have been
wrong? Nobody in his right mind commits crimes out in the
open,” Trump’s defenders said.
When he lost the
election of 2020, Trump made repeated statements that could be interpreted, and
were interpreted, as trying to influence state recounts in Georgia, Arizona,
Michigan and other states where he had lost by narrow margins, which amounts to
a federal crime we’ve been told. He invited legislators from Michigan and
Pennsylvania to the White House and tried to convince them to seat Republican
slates of electors in their states, and he didn’t hide it. The story of
what he was up to was told by White House reporters in real time.
And then came January
6, when as he did repeatedly at campaign rallies in 2016 and 2020, Trump got up
in front of a crowd of his followers on the Ellipse and came right out and said
what he wanted them to do. They were to be “tough” and march on the
Capitol and show those lily-livered members of Congress what they need to
do. In December, in the run-up to the rally when he was ginning-up
support to overturn the election, he tweeted to his followers urging them to come
to Washington on the 6th, “Be there. Be wild!” There he went again,
inciting a riot in plain sight.
Aging pundits who had
been around for Watergate even pointed out that everything Nixon did in secret,
Trump seemed willing to do out in the open. That was the difference
between the two men, it was said. Trump was shameless while Nixon was
obsessively secretive.
The Meadows texts show
the secretive side of Trumpworld. While Trump and his entire party were
publicly playing down the insurrection as a “peaceful tourist visit,” behind
the scenes Fox News anchors, members of Trump’s family, and members of Congress
were trading texts proving that they knew exactly what was going on and
why. CNN helpfully summed up the texts this way:
"He's got to
condemn this shit ASAP," Don Jr. wrote. "We need an Oval office
address."
"Mark, the
president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,"
Ingraham wrote. "This is hurting all of us. He is destroying
his legacy."
"Can he make a
statement?" asked Hannity. "Ask people to leave the Capitol."
"Please, get him
on TV," begged Fox & Friends' Kilmeade. "Destroying everything
you have accomplished."
Nobody – not Meadows,
not Hannity, not Suckling Son No. 1 Don Jr. – none of them ever thought what
they said privately would see the light of day. Trump himself famously
has never written a single email, but it’s obvious that plenty of them were
written on his behalf. Which makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else is
out there.
There have always been
two Trumps, one for public consumption, and one behind the closed doors of
Beverly Hills Hotel suites, Trump Tower offices, the Oval Office, and out on
the golf course where I’ve always been convinced the great majority of Trump’s
secret life has always been lived. Why do you think the White House press
pool was never…never…allowed to photograph him during his golf
games? Why do you think the names of his “golfing partners” were never
revealed to the press? Why do you think his White House schedule was
frequently a blank slate upon which the words “Executive Time” were typed again
and again and again? We’ll never find out how many times he spoke to
Vladimir Putin on the phone. We’ll never find out what Trump did when he
walked down the stairs of Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane.
In fact, every time
there’s been a crack in the door to Trump’s secret life, what peeked out has
been sordid, disgusting, criminal, and usually all three at once.
There are more text
messages from Meadows to come, we’re told by the Jan. 6 committee. Members
of Congress who sent them as they cowered in their offices afraid for their
lives will be named. I can’t wait.