December 10, 2018

Trump’s Latest Meltdown Shows Even He Knows This Could Be the Beginning of the End

The president kicked off the work week with a pair of panicky tweets.

Olivier Douliery/ZUMA

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President Donald Trump lashed out at the renewed focus that he may have committed campaign finance violations by personally directing hush-money payments prosecutors have identified as criminal to influence the 2016 election, claiming in a pair of typo-ridden tweets Monday morning that the money was nothing more than a “simple private transaction.” 

Trump also cited Fox News to assert that lawmakers were going after the payments because they had failed to find evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russia.

The tweets came as Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff, raised the possibility over the weekend that the president could be indicted after federal prosecutors concluded in an explosive filing Friday that Trump had directed his former personal attorney to make payments to silence two women from publicly speaking about alleged affairs with the president.

“My takeaway is there’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” Schiff told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Sunday said that if federal prosecutors’ accusations were true, the payments proved Trump “was at the center of several massive frauds against the American people.”

“They would be impeachable offenses,” he told CNN. “Whether they’re important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question.”

The tweets, including the typos, were roundly criticized, with many saying they demonstrated the president’s increasing panic over the various investigations into his campaign:

On Sunday, the New York Times reported federal prosecutors are now focusing their investigation on what other Trump Organization executives may have known about the illegal campaign contributions.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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