Trump’s Weekend Twitter Outburst, Explained

The president responded first on Saturday night with a tweet in which he said he had “directed” all White House staff, including McGahn, to “fully cooperate” with Mueller’s office.

But on Sunday morning, Trump unleashed a multi-tweet attack on the Times, the special counsel investigation, and others, in response to the Saturday story.

Oddly, Trump ended with a comparison of the situation to that surrounding former Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy:

What does it all mean—the story about McGahn, Trump’s angry response, and the McCarthy reference? McGahn’s likely cooperation with the Times on the story suggests he feels a need to control his part of the larger Russia investigation story and to put more distance between himself and Trump. There are some clues, including this characterization of McGahn’s views from the Times: “As White House counsel, not a personal lawyer, he viewed his role as protector of the presidency, not of Mr. Trump.” And Bill Burck, the lawyer representing Don McGahn (along with former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former adviser Steve Bannon), is apparently telling people it was “insane” for Trump simply to assent to Mueller’s request to interview McGahn, given the president’s legal exposure in a possible obstruction of justice case.

Marcy Wheeler, a left-wing legal journalist, argues in her analysis that the Times story is a useful bit of PR for McGahn, who may be less worried about Trump’s legal exposure than his own. Specifically, Wheeler suggests, McGahn could be concerned about his own role in the explanation of the firing of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser whose pre-inauguration conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak drew scrutiny as Flynn was under investigation by the FBI.

That brings us to Trump’s response, in which he claims once again he has nothing to hide and stating that the Times story implies McGahn is a “RAT” like his counterpart in the Nixon White House, John Dean. Dean cooperated with Watergate investigators to provide evidence that he and other White House staff had assisted Richard Nixon in the cover-up. Trump asserted any implication that, like Dean, McGahn has turned on the president is false (negating McGahn’s apparent efforts to separate himself from Trump on this).

But we don’t know the extent of what McGahn has told Mueller, whether or not those 30 hours of conversation have touched on more than just the question of obstruction of justice, and whether McGahn’s testimony doesn’t end up damaging Trump’s argument that he did nothing wrong. After more than a year of investigating, we don’t know what Mueller knows. Judging by the evident anger at the Times story, Trump doesn’t know, either.

It’s possible, if Trump really does have nothing to hide, that Sunday morning’s tweet storm is another expression of frustration at the investigation, which has hampered his administration from Day One, and at the media that perpetuates the story. It could also be the case that if Trump is concerned about what McGahn’s cooperation means for him, talking about something else—the “failing” and “fake news” media, the “real” collusion by “Crooked Hillary and the Dems,” and the president’s list of horribles, “Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Strzok lies to Congress”—is as good a tool as any for reorienting the public conversation.

Finally, there’s Trump’s reference to Joe McCarthy. He means to liken Mueller’s investigation to McCarthy’s witch hunt against communists in the federal government (though it was undoubtedly true that some communists with Soviet connection did occupy significant positions within the State Department). It’s a recognizable, if outdated, reference, but it’s all the more curious because McCarthy’s right-hand man in his anti-communist crusades in the Senate was lawyer Roy Cohn, who later became Trump’s counsel and a mentor, of sorts, to the future president.