Donald Trump is going through what is undeniably the worst legal peril he has ever faced in his life, as he wades through literal dozens of formal, criminal indictments against him, on both a state and federal level, including multiple felony offenses, that will go down in history books to be read and studied by our grandchildren some day.
Trump has consistently attempted to put on a facade of confidence, arrogance, and innocence against the array of charges lodged against him, but one prominent columnist said that’s all starting to slip. Cracks are opening in Trump’s mask, and all you see when looking in, is pure fear.
At the beginning of this week, the scandal-ridden former president sat for a rather tumultuous interview with Fox News anchor Brett Baier that, in the end, likely only served to worsen Trump’s already catastrophic legal problems. But it wasn’t the legal implications of Donald’s interview that caught the attention of columnist Tom Nichols, as much as it was the fear and panic written all over Trump’s face.
Writing in a new column for The Atlantic, Nichols made note of the ex-president’s “jittery and combative” during the recent two-part Fox interview with Baier, but further noted, “That’s not unusual.” What was unusual, in his opinion, was Donald’s clear uneasiness throughout the entire interview, something that Nichols said indicates that something is not right with the ex-president.
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“Donald Trump seems, more than anything, to be afraid,” the columnist wrote.
Nichols made note of Trump’s incessant public complaints about the Right-wing network that, in Donald’s opinion, has not been supportive enough in the midst of his scandal and legal peril. But Tom noted that despite Trump’s public attacks against the cable network, “Fox, after all, is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 millionas the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a ‘hostile’ network.”
Nichols went on to point to one particular answer Trump gave to a question posed to him by Baier that Tom believes is certain to send the ex-president’s legal team into a panicked spiral.
“In a potentially important moment, Baier pressed Trump about why he hadn’t simply returned the boxes of materials as the government demanded.”
“Trump, after his ritual invocation of the Divine Right of Presidential Box Ownership, said that he’d wanted to return them but hadn’t had enough time to go through everything, so he didn’t know what was in them. Bad move: Trump had already gotten his lawyers to certify that he did, in fact, know what was in them — or, more accurately, to certify that nothing classified or sensitive remained. As some legal analysts quickly pointed out, including a former prosecutor named Chris Christie, this all sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.”
Read Nichols’ full analysis with The Atlantic here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
