Occam's Razor

It’s quite ironic that one of Netflix’s best series House of Cards is playing out in real life in the White House. Donald Trump of course is no Frank Underwood. He has zero political experience and since getting into office has not acquired any either. Watching him bumble his way through the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany last week was painful. Emblematic of the outcome were the logistics leading up to the meeting. This doesn’t bode well I thought when I learned that Trump and his staff waited too long to book accommodations in Hamburg. Trump ended up at a German government guest residency. Trump’s staff apparently holed up with the U.S. Consulate General. Maybe they brought sleeping bags and camped out on the floor. Trump either couldn’t be bothered to absorb his briefings or more likely got them and promptly forgot the key points. He winged his way through the whole meeting looking weirder and more ostracized as it progressed.

Given his incurious and bumbling nature, I should not be too surprised that these traits seem to apply to his family and advisers as well. The Trump Empire, such as it is, seems to be all about show, but is little on substance. His hotels and resorts are sometimes profitable, but more often leave investors in the lurch. Just last week Trump’s shuttered Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City began a liquidation sale. The Trump façade is going. The new owners will try to turn it into something more mainstream and likely more profitable, and attaching the Trump brand to the property is like a millstone around the neck, so it had to go. Hard Rock International bought the property for a bargain basement $50M. Bear in mind its construction cost about $930M.

In any event, the Trumps operate mostly on instinct and not much on common sense. They seem to believe they are exempt from most rules and if not it’s just a matter of money to put their problems behind them. With a White House in chaos it’s not surprising that someone dropped the ball on hotel rooms at the G-20. Trump naturally blames it on the Obama Administration, as if it’s the job of previous administrations to handle logistics of current administrations. So it certainly didn’t surprise me that Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016 met with a woman with Russian connections and was lured to a meeting by a promise of dirty laundry on the Clinton campaign. Junior’s disappointment seemed to be that the Russian did not deliver the goods. However, the expectation that she would was enough to bring Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and his brother-in-law Jared Kushner to the meeting too. Like his father, Junior made the problem worse by admitting that’s why he agreed to meet. That looks like an unprofitable mistake, as Junior has since lawyered up.

When the New York Times article came out, I thought there goes the first domino. Finally there is evidence that ties a Trump to the Russian government, albeit somewhat indirectly. Bear in mind that for anyone with any political experience, even the suggestion of a meeting like this would have sent campaign officials running the other way, and probably calling the FBI to report the incident. Colluding with a foreign government to influence an election is a crime. Junior has pretty much admitted it, which means it’s just a matter of time before an indictment against him is issued. Junior’s only real hope is that his father remains president long enough so he can pardon him, which is the likely outcome. Trump will likely be issuing lots of pardons before he is removed from office. Meanwhile, Junior will be financing his attorney’s new yacht.

Usually when a domino falls it doesn’t take long for the next one to fall. This one came just a day later with another New York Times story, this one claiming that Junior knew in an email before the meeting that the Russian government was trying to influence the Trump campaign. The story behind both these stories though is the more interesting news: the information came from people in the White House. Multiple people inside the White House are now so alarmed by what they know that they are actively working to remove their boss. We’ll likely learn the names of these Deep Throats in time. Apparently job security is not a concern, or it’s less a concern than acting on what they feel is their patriotic duty.

That these first two dominoes fell is not a surprise. That more will fall won’t be a surprise either. Something will implicate Trump directly, likely sooner rather than later. During the campaign Trump said he hoped the Russians would provide Clinton’s missing emails, a curiously timed thing as it happened shortly after this meeting at Trump Tower. He campaigned on a friendlier relationship with Russia and seemed unconcerned that they had taken over Crimea and Russian paramilitary forces had captures much of eastern Ukraine.

Trump is clearly no Frank Underwood. He doesn’t know how to be devious. The fictional Underwood built his house of cards on something of a firm foundation: with safety checks and sycophants stupid enough to take the fall for him. It appears that Trump and the Trump campaign simply weren’t smart enough to worry about these exposures. Which means their house of cards is flimsy indeed. No surprise then that not quite six months into his administration it is collapsing under its own weight.

Here’s one edifice that deserves demolition, and the sooner the better. The irony is that Trump is likely to end up impaling himself. This would be a fitting end to the most brazenly crooked administration in history. Expect more and bigger dominoes to keep falling and to fall more quickly.