Rantt Rundown: President Trump Believes He’s A King

Day 501 of the Trump presidency
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by: Ahmed Baba on June 4, 2018

President Donald Trump poses for a portrait in the Oval Office in Washington after an interview with The Associated Press. April 21, 2017 (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

President Donald Trump poses for a portrait in the Oval Office in Washington after an interview with The Associated Press. April 21, 2017 (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

The President’s disinformation campaign alleging he is above the law has begun.

Over the weekend, a January 2018 memo from Trump’s legal team to Special Counsel Robert Mueller leaked. It made some troubling claims. Aside from claiming that the President of the United States cannot obstruct justice, Trump’s legal team admitted that Donald Trump Sr. personally dictated Trump Jr.’s initial misleading statement about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives. The admission contradicts months of denials from the White House and Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow. It also adds further evidence to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction case. The boldness of the admission makes sense given the assertion that the crime of obstruction of justice does not apply to the President.

Then came Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani’s claim that President Trump could’ve shot Former FBI Director James Comey and he still wouldn’t be indicted, he’d have to be impeached. Although true that a sitting President can’t be indicted, it was a startling example and one that further bolsters the President’s new approach.

And today, President Trump openly declared himself above the law and questioned the constitutionality of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Both of these claims are, of course, lies.

So why is the President doing this? As I mentioned in last week’s Unpresidented, this isn’t a legal strategy. It’s a PR play to convince his base that he is above the law. The strategy could be in an effort to protect the President in case Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report shows conclusive evidence that President Trump is guilty of obstruction of obstruction of justice. This way, even if Democrats win the House and Senate, and the House files articles of impeachment, they won’t be able to flip enough Republican Senators’ votes to successfully remove Trump from office because of the base’s blind support of him.

And, looks like his propaganda arm over at Fox News is already hard at work helping him sell this false narrative.

President Donald Trump is conducting himself like the wannabe-king the Founding Fathers designed the U.S. Constitution to protect us from.

We – average Americans, members of the media, and Congressional leaders – must push back on this authoritarian rhetoric before it’s too late.

Meanwhile…

  • Special Counsel Robert Mueller turned up the heat on Trump’s former Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort.

As President Donald Trump huddled in the Oval Office on Friday with Kim Jong Un’s right-hand man, he was accompanied by only one other US official: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Absent was the administration’s most vocal North Korea hawk, national security adviser John Bolton.

The White House insists the meeting was always intended to remain small. But the tableau reflected deeper rifts among Trump’s national security team and a new reality as the President prepares for his historic meeting with Kim next week in Singapore: the voices advocating most forcefully to tighten the noose on Pyongyang have been sidelined as Trump seeks out a history-making handshake.

  • Today’s Supreme Court ruling stirred up some confusion. A great thread on it:

  • The Parkland survivors gave us a reason to hope.

Rundown // Donald Trump / Goverment / Jounalism / Obstruction Of Justice
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by: Ahmed Baba

Ahmed Baba is the Co-Founder and President of Rantt. Writer of Unpresidented, Ahmed documented and analyzed every day of the Trump presidency. He's also a columnist at The Independent and his work has been cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Blavity, Newsweek, The Telegraph, and more. He can be reached at [email protected] or found on Twitter @AhmedBaba_.

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