Oh dear, oh dear. Donald Trump just can't find someone to represent him in the Mueller investigation. He pushed John Dowd out the door in favor of Joe DiGenova, who's now too "disheveled" or something for him. Morning Joe focuses on the problem.
"It's the loneliest job and the buck stops there," historian Jon Meacham said. "But it's a big operation and you have to have people who you can trust and people that we can trust to actually execute the public business and right now, from everything I know you're hearing and that i'm hearing, people just don't want to go in."
"Well, we wondered this morning where Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is going to have anything," Mike Barnicle said.
"Quote, 'Every voter in 2016 understood that Donald Trump had a bad history with women. But mistakes of character tend to catch up with everyone and that's what is now happening with President Trump and his many women. Mr. Trump can't retain the best legal counsel because no one wants a client who ignores all advice. He wants to answer questions from Mr. Mueller but probably won't prepare enough to avoid accidental self-incrimination. The Stormy Daniels case is typical of Mr. Trump's pre-presidential behavior and thinks he can get away, with enough threats and dissembling, with anything. He's never understood that a president can't behave that way and this may be the cause of his downfall."
"Susan (Del Percio, GOP strategist), this is just among the first cracks in the terms of support, editorial support from the president for the Journal."
"The journal is exactly right," she said. "When you talk about the fault of his character coming back to haunt him, that not only plays to the president but also plays to a lot of Republicans in the House and the Senate right now who should be saying I will stand up for what's right, I will speak against the president and what he's doing, whether it's his policies or even the attacks he makes on women and other people.
"But the Stormy Daniels thing is just something that hits him so differently, and I'm not -- we know he hasn't tweeted about it. He hasn't gone anywhere, but I think it's just a matter of time and that's what I think a lot of people are waiting for. "
"There's a piece in the New York Times today about various Republicans running around the country. and they cannot -- they can't stand up and talk about real issues that affect people because the first question out of the box is the president's behavior," Barnicle pointed out. (Editor's note: Listening to Republicans lie about their tax bill is no big loss, but point taken.)
"Right. It seems to me that this Teflon Don is no longer Teflon Don when it comes to the Stormy Daniels question," Eddie Glaude said.
"There's the case, there's the case. there's the client and the climate. I don't think any lawyer wants to take on the case. And then there's the climate. The climate is not only the Me Too movement. the Me Too movement has changed the way in which people understand and accept certain kinds of terms of the serious, I think, response to Russian interference in our elections, there's the kind of economic uncertainty. There's the chaos that's coming out of the White House, so all of this that I think informs how people are judging and assessing," he concluded.
