GOP tells Trump to put a sock in it concerning Mueller
Does anyone in the Beltway Republican establishment honestly beleive celebrity real estate mogul Donald J. Trump will listen to common sense? Good luck with that…
Trump’s tendency to vent on social media has long frustrated Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has publicly implored Trump to pull back on Twitter.
A report in Friday’s Washington Post revealed that the president has a “new morning ritual” of phone calls with his outside legal team — calls that are apprently welcomed by his political advisers and might help nudge him away from incendiary tweets, according to The Post.
But the president’s tendency to court controversy is not limited to social media. In his interview with “Fox & Friends,” broadcast Friday, Trump described it as “very bothersome” that Mueller was “very, very good friends with Comey” and suggested that the people the special counsel had hired were “all Hillary Clinton supporters.”
Mueller was Comey’s predecessor as FBI director and the two men know each other well. But Mueller is also respected across the political spectrum, and his defenders insist that he will investigate without fear or favor.
At the White House media briefing on Friday, press secretary Sean Spicer reiterated that Trump had “no intention” of firing Mueller, despite speculation to that effect that flared earlier this month. Spicer would not be drawn out to comment on Trump’s remarks made during the Fox News interview, saying instead that his quotes “speak for themselves.”
True – and not the best choice of words if you are trying to defend Trump, Sean! .
… Others noted the ever-present danger of assuming that controversy hurts Trump in a fundamental way. His political doom has been predicted incessantly since he began his quest for the White House two years ago, and he has consistently proved the naysayers wrong.
“There were many instances in the campaign when he got some momentum but couldn’t let prior things go, and would continue to tweet about them in ways that, at the time, many of us thought would be damaging to him,” said Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. “But he defies normal expectations. The things that we thought would kill him, haven’t.”
Yet his poll ratings are in the gutter – except among his angry, fanatical, anti-intellectual, nativist base. These are the only people who reflexively support Trump every time he trashes Mueller.
And this is not the first time Republicans have said they wished Trump would learn to manage his mouth, as Politico pointed out two weeks ago.
