This is an adapted extract from December 9 episode of “Deadline: White House.”
During an interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press,” Donald Trump he was asked if he intended to shoot FBI Director Christopher Wray a man whom the president-elect himself appointed during his first term.
Trump responded by lashing out at Wray, telling Welker he was “unhappy with the things he (Wray has) done.” He then accused the FBI director of invading his home. — a reference to the court-approved search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property after he refused to return classified documents taken from the White House during his presidency.
Kinzinger basically told Trump to do it. This is the perfect answer.
I recently saw the movie “The Apprentice” and that crystallized, for me, Trump’s entire communications strategy. It’s quite simple, there are three central things in Trump’s philosophy: First, always attack. Second, lie whenever you need to. And third, never admit you’re wrong.
And if you watch his interview with Welker, that’s exactly the formula Trump followed. He tried to turn every question asked of him into an attack on someone else. He lied when he needed to, and he refused to admit he was wrong about Nothing.
To that end, during the same interview, Trump made threats against members of the January 6 committee: tell Welker they should “go to jail”. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the committee, later responded to this threat: told CNN he has “absolutely no worries”: the president-elect will try to put him in prison.
“First of all, the executive branch cannot attack the legislative branch because we have embarrassed them,” he said on Sunday. “It’s not a sin, it’s not against the law.” Kinzinger basically told Trump to do it. This is the perfect response to the president-elect’s strategy of attacks and lies.
I’m not saying Trump can’t disrupt people’s lives with investigations: the power of a prosecutor to ruin someone’s life without ever filing charges is real.
But that said, whether it’s a civil or criminal case, Trump and the lawyers around him know that the Constitution says defendants must be tried by jury. They also know that in a criminal trial, the jury must agree unanimously, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a crime has been committed. You can’t prove that without evidence, and prosecutors, frankly, don’t file charges without evidence.
So despite the bluffs and bluster that are at the heart of Trump’s communications strategy, many of his threats, as Kinzinger puts it, are just screaming.
Allison Detzel contributed.
