Attorney General William Barr’s letter on Robert Mueller’s report handed President Trump his talking points on a silver platter. All he had to do was stick with them and his critics, who had spent months championing Mueller’s investigation as the ticket to boot him from the White House, would either shut up or continue to talk themselves into an even deeper hole.
But, as always, Trump couldn’t just take good news and run with it. Instead, he immediately went in for vindictive counter-investigations. On Monday, Trump made clear that the first on his list to be “looked at” were those who had been critical of him on election interference which he blasted as “treasonous” and “evil.
Meanwhile, the crusade against the critics continued in Congress as Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham R-S.C., demanded a new special counsel to investigate Mueller’s investigation.
These efforts, although perhaps satisfying a desire for revenge, are unhelpful to the president or GOP priorities. Instead, they simply set the stage for another bout of spiteful, partisan attacks of the very sort that Trump and his allies have spent the last year complaining about and which Trump characterized as shameful.
Trump would have done well to leave his remarks at that, perfectly casting himself as the victim of the “witch hunt” he spent so much time tweeting about. In addition to appealing to his base’s sense of victimization at the hands of “the left,” that approach would also have allowed him to move on to dealing with pressing issues facing the country like healthcare, education, criminal justice, and the opioid crisis, along with a whole host of other policy issues, that actually matter to people lives — and to his re-election.
The investigation drama may have captured the news cycle, but it clearly hasn’t (yet) yielded the desired results for those who demanded it. Republicans aren’t likely to have any better luck with fishing expeditions of their own and would lose the high ground Barr handed them in doing so.
