Many complications in the weekend news dumps … the Russians get their lulz from Trump’s missteps in their own disinforming media, and US media disclosures that would normally sink a presidency linger like a post-coital glow. But it’s still about lawfare.
Apparently Trump missed the payoff deadline, so the $130k to Stormy and the $150k payment the National Enquirer made to Karen McDougal loom larger for a potential violation of election law. Apparently most of Trump’s vices can be explained by his sex club activity from the 1980s, since his predilection for adult media workers seems not have run its course even during his third marriage.
And more to the point, he has a team of backers who are far more savvy than he is, and he has learned to step back. Everyone thinks Trump needs to be the only guy, he needs to be in the spotlight all the time. And while that’s true on a kind of cult of personality level, Trump has always surrounded himself with extremely ruthless, very savvy people, usually lawyers, people like Roy Cohn or Michael Cohen, who are just brutal. They understand the system, they understand how to manipulate it.
This is also true of his circle of oligarchs, though in that case Trump has debt, and so I think he doesn’t quite hold the strings in that relationship. That’s why he’s so relentlessly deferential to Putin, to the Kremlin, to this circle of oligarchs. So that changes things a little bit, but yeah, Trump knows what he’s doing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he knows what he’s doing is wrong, because I don’t think he has a conception of right or wrong, but I think he knows what he’s doing is illegal, and that’s why he’s trying to manipulate the justice system in any way that he can—no matter what kind of laws he’s re-writing, no matter what kind of illicit schemes he’s doing—in order to get out of this mess and in order to consolidate power. That’s unfortunately where we are.