WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE QUEEN FOR A DAY?

Back in the 1950s, there was a cringe-worthy daytime TV show called Queen For A Day, in which desperate housewives would tell stories of hard luck, and the studio audience would vote on which one was most deserving of a new refrigerator, or a few hundred dollars. 

Apparently, federal prosecutors now offer what they call “queen for a day interviews” to accused criminals whom they have dead to rights.  It’s a last chance for the accused to spill their guts, telling everything they know about higher level criminals in the hopes of plea-bargaining their sentence down.

Rick Gates has reportedly had a queen for a day interview.  This is not good news for Donald Trump.  Nor was the indictment last Friday of 13 Russians, even though Trump’s immediate reaction was celebratory.  If you’re wondering about the significance of those indictments, take a look at the tweets he sent on Sunday.  He was in full panic mode. 

Someone must have taken Trump aside and explained that these indictments did NOT exonerate him.  Rather, they rendered his first line of defense (denying that Russian interference in the 2016 election ever happened) dead on arrival. 

If there were any smart people in the White House, they’d be hard at work on a narrative in which Donald Trump was an innocent victim, betrayed by his campaign underlings who, unbeknownst to him, worked with Russia on his behalf in 2016.  That version of events would have unraveled sooner or later, but in the moment, it would have been hailed as one of those “pivots” that the mainstream media longs for.  Beltway pundits would have talked themselves into believing it, at least until Mueller’s next round of indictments.

But instead of developing a false but temporarily sustainable narrative, Trump continued to double down on his false and now totally unsustainable “no collusion” mantra.

Occam’s Razor is a medieval problem-solving rubric which posits that when you encounter two or more competing explanations for a given phenomenon, you should prefer the explanation that is least complicated.

In order to advocate for Donald Trump’s no collusion story, you have some ‘splainin’ to do.  You have to explain why he tells so many demonstrable lies about his relationship with Russia.  Specifically, why has he lied about his business relationships with Russians; about the nature of his contacts with Russians before and during his campaign; about Russian interference on his behalf in 2016; about Don Jr.’s motives for meeting with Russian spies during the campaign; and about his own motives for firing James Comey?  While you’re at it, why does he keep lying about the FBI and the American intelligence community?

None of his lies are particularly clever or convincing.  They are easily disproved by information in the public record, often including earlier statements from Trump himself.  If he’s innocent, why does Donald Trump go to the trouble of telling such easily refutable lies?

I can only think of two simple answers to that question.  You could argue that these particular Trump lies are meaningless, because he lies about everything.  He has lied so long and so consistently that by now he may not even know the difference between true and false.  It’s just Trump being Trump. 

Alas, there are two major problems with that argument.  First, it’s not a very inspiring defense.  If that’s the best his supporters can do, it begs for the invocation of the 25th Amendment’s incapacity clause.  Not to mention that it is entirely possible that Trump could be both a delusional liar AND be guilty of working with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

Or, instead of clinging to a position that requires us to believe six impossible things before breakfast, we could opt for the other simple explanation for Trump’s lies about Russia, which also has the virtue of being consistent with publicly available evidence:  Trump is guilty; he knows he’s guilty; and he knows that Mueller knows.  Since he can’t mount a principled, reality-based defense, he and his minions’ only hope is to cry “fake news” and hope that his followers will choose Trump over principles and reality.

Meanwhile, Robert Mueller quietly dropped another indictment on Tuesday – that of Dutch attorney Alexander van der Zwaan.  Zwaan is the son of a prominent Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin, and he’s already pleaded guilty.  Mueller is using Zwaan and Rick Gates to tighten the screws on Paul Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign manager.  Manafort is one of a small number of people outside Trump’s immediate family whose testimony could cripple Trump’s presidency.

The fact that Trump is scared means that the good guys are winning.