By Eric Felten
Tuesday, April 09, 2019
Low-Energy Jeb. Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Pocahontas.
Crazy Bernie. Crooked Hillary. Little Rocket Man. If there is one defining
characteristic of Donald Trump, candidate and president, it’s his casual,
gleeful resort to insulting his opponents. It is a strategy — or perhaps just a
reflex — so outside modern political norms that it has left Trump’s opponents
slack-jawed and seemingly baffled as to how to respond.
But not everyone on the receiving end of Trump’s Don
Rickles treatment has been thrown back on their heels. Take the recent example
of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, who has made it clear that Trump’s
incontinent insults were a primary — if not the
primary — reason a special counsel was appointed.
“There were a number of things that caused us to believe
that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts to open the
investigation,” McCabe told 60 Minutes.
“The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative
efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt.” McCabe thought the president
was insulting the FBI and its leadership, and he seems to have taken it
personally. But not nearly as personally as he took it when Trump insulted his
wife.
On May 10, 2017, the morning after Trump fired FBI
director James Comey, the president put in a call to McCabe. In his book, The Threat, McCabe recounts being taken
aback at how little Trump knew of rules of the game: The president not only
introduced himself as “Don,” but did so on an unsecured line. He talked about
maybe coming over to the FBI building to meet and greet. He talked about having
McCabe come over to the White House to meet and greet. The acting director
thought these were terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ideas, but couldn’t
bring himself to say so.
Then, Trump asked about McCabe’s wife. Jill McCabe had
featured briefly in the presidential campaign. Her 2015 run for the Virginia
state Senate was largely funded by PACs associated with then-Virginia governor
— and long-time Clinton confederate — Terry McAuliffe. Andrew McCabe had been
involved in investigating Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified documents;
Jill McCabe had financed her campaign with money from a Clinton ally. Trump had
asserted this was a conflict of interest, despite the fact that Jill McCabe had
already lost her race by the time Andrew McCabe became involved in the Clinton
investigation.
Now Trump took a different angle of attack. There “was a
tone in his voice that sounded like a sneer,” McCabe writes in his book. “He
said, ‘That must’ve been really tough. To lose. To be a loser.’”
“No man wants to hear anyone call his wife a loser, most
of all me,” McCabe told 60 Minutes.
“It was just bullying.” But instead of rebuking Trump, McCabe said “Okay, sir,”
and hung up. Then he got to work: “That was the crisis week,” 60 Minutes declared, “when McCabe argued
for an independent counsel to take over the investigations of the president.”
Perhaps it’s entirely coincidental that within a day or
two of the president telling McCabe his wife was a “loser,” an outraged McCabe
was pushing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to name a special counsel. I
doubt it. I suspect Trump’s gratuitous insult of Jill McCabe led Andrew McCabe
to seek satisfaction. How better than by forcing the president into a duel with
Robert Mueller? If so, Trump’s inability to temper his insults was instrumental
in launching the investigation that dogged the first two years of his
administration.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2016, Glenn Simpson and
Christopher Steele shopped the dossier of Trump–Russia conspiracy twaddle that
Steele had compiled. The collection of allegations ended up being shared with
everyone from House speaker Paul Ryan’s office to John Kerry’s State Department
to The New Yorker to the New York Times. No one was willing to
take the astonishing accusations public without some verification. Except for a
friend of Senator John McCain.
McCain, you’ll recall, had suffered bizarre attacks of
his own at then-candidate Trump’s hands in July 2015, when Trump declared, “I
like people who weren’t captured” apparently referencing the Arizona senator’s
five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Is it any surprise that
when McCain and his closest advisers had the opportunity to hit back at Trump,
they didn’t hesitate?
Having heard about Steele’s assertions, McCain sent a
trusted aide, David Kramer, to meet with Steele in London. Kramer, then the
senior director for Human Rights and Democracy at the McCain Institute, was
briefed by Steele in late November 2016. Back in Washington afterward, he gave
a copy of the dossier to McCain, who later passed it on to the FBI. He also
touched off the chain of events that would make the dossier public, meeting
with Ken Bensinger of BuzzFeed to
share its contents in December of 2016.
Just as it may be a coincidence that McCabe pushed for a
special counsel to investigate the man who insulted his wife, so too it may be
mere happenstance that the politico who acted on the dossier was one whose
friend and mentor Trump had grossly insulted. Then again, maybe it’s no
coincidence at all.
Either way, the president’s taunts and gibes have cost
him far more than they have won him — and they show no signs of abating any
time soon.
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