Scott wrote last week about Byron York’s revealing podcast with John Dowd, who represented President Trump during a substantial portion of Trump’s dealings with special counsel Robert Mueller. Byron has now posted, on Ricochet, the second installment of his interview with Dowd. He writes about it here. An excerpt:
In our earlier talk, Dowd stressed that the Trump White House fully cooperated with Mueller’s investigation, and that on more than one occasion Trump instructed Dowd to inform Mueller that the president respected the prosecutor’s work. But how could one say Trump fully cooperated when the president was, at the same time, loudly denouncing the probe as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” and bashing Mueller’s prosecutors as “17 angry Democrats”?
The answer lay in Trump’s longtime habit of operating on two levels. On the surface, Trump sets off controversies, often using Twitter to say something outrageous that sets the media agenda and leaves some commentators with their hair on fire. At the same time, below the surface, Trump is actually taking steps to get a particular job done.
That was true with the Russia probe. For public consumption, Trump was denouncing Mueller and trashing his team. Behind the scenes, Trump was cooperating and making sure his staff did the same. The Trump White House offered everyone (except, of course, the president himself) to be interviewed, and reams and reams of documents that other White Houses might have withheld on the grounds of executive or other privilege. So Trump simultaneously attacked and cooperated.
Asked about the attacks, Dowd said Mueller understood that Trump had to mount a political defense on the Russia issue. “Bob understood this, it was political,” Dowd said. ” [Trump] had to handle the political side, and that was his way of doing it with his tweets and his comments … Bob was a big boy about the political side of it. He understood the president had to address the politics of it. He couldn’t just say nothing. People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly, and he had to take [Mueller] on.”
Interesting. Hypothesis: Trump adopts the persona of a vain and boastful man who overestimates his own abilities, because it is the surest way to cause his opponents to underestimate him.
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