Not 'bothering to hide' it anymore: Conservative says Trump relishes your 'blowback'

U.S. President Donald Trump, in front of a painting of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, smiles during an event to announce that the Space Force Command will move from Colorado to Alabama, in the Oval Office REUTERS

Conservative White House correspondent Andrew Egger tells Bulwark that President Donald Trump 1.0 tried to hide his corruption and malfeasance behind a veneer of denial, scorn and hackneyed pivots and whataboutism. Trump 2.0 doesn’t even deny it.

“Watching the Justice Department slide greasily toward an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over the past few days, the most striking thing was how little the president and his allies were bothering to hide what they were up to,” Egger said.

When Trump’s appointed U.S. attorney Erik Siebert admitted doubts that the government had a prosecutable case against Trump’s self-identified enemy James Comey “Trump didn’t have to say out loud and in public that he was firing him for just this reason. But he did,” said Egger.

Trump wrote plainly on Truth Social that Siebert failed to prosecute his enemy, accusing Siebert of being “a Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job.”

Neither did Trump have to frame his post as a series of explicit instructions to Attorney General Pam Bondi, said Egger. But he did.

“After firing Siebert, Trump didn’t have to appoint, as his replacement, the most transparently corrupt sort of candidate imaginable: one of his own former defense lawyers with zero prosecutorial experience. He could have easily tapped a MAGA lawyer with at least a patina of respectability, if for nothing more than plausible deniability. But he didn’t,” said Egger. “Getting someone in there who would do what he wanted absolutely, zero question, took top priority. In went Lindsey Halligan.”

Additionally, Egger said Trump didn’t have to summon Bondi to the White House for dinner Wednesday night as the Justice Department lurched toward filing charges against Comey, or — worse — release the photos of that dinner to be posted on social media to broadcast the collusion between the White House and the justice department for all to see.

He didn’t have to do that, said Egger. Still, he did.

The old Trump and his allies “worked hard to brush accusations of corruption under a thick layer of disorienting counternarratives,” said Egger. “Nothing was ever as it seemed, they used to insist: It was all witch hunts, or media bias, or Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“All that has fallen away,” Egger said, “replaced by leering exultation in the application of power against Trump’s enemies. ‘JAMES COMEY IS A DIRTY COP,’ Trump posted this morning. ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’ They want you to know they’re violating your precious norms. They relish the blowback.”

Eggers expects the Republican-led Senate to ignore this overt collusion or support it, but Trump’s attempt to manipulate the justice system still faces the uphill battle of an independent jury.

“Trump may have folded up the entire federal government, from Congress to the Justice Department, and put it in his pocket. But he can’t change the fact that Comey will ultimately answer only to a judge and to a jury of his peers,” Egger said.

Read the Bulwark report at this link.

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