A failure to impeach

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News?

That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy. Just a few months ago, Trump was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, mostly refraining from attacking him directly, and hoping the investigation would somehow go away. Now, Trump is waging and, if the polls are correct, winning a political war on him. ‘He has turned this investigation on its head,’ one Trump campaign veteran said recently, with much admiration.

Trump’s resurgence happens to coincide with the growing realisation that Mueller might never make his much–anticipated collusion case against the President — the charge that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to rig the 2016 election. And that, in turn, is creating political ripples: Democrats who were hoping Mueller would hand them a ready-to-use case against Trump are worried that appearing overly eager to bring down the President could cost them in November’s midterm elections.

There’s no doubt Trump’s first strategy for dealing with the Mueller investigation was not working. Although talking heads spent hours speculating on whether the President would fire the special counsel, the White House plan for dealing with Mueller was mostly focused on cooperating with him. Over the years, previous presidents have made all sorts of creative efforts to resist subpoenas from investigators. Trump didn’t do that; instead, he obediently turned over reams of documents to Mueller.