As President Donald Trump wrapped up his swing through New York City on Thursday, he stopped by the luxury restaurant Cipriani to deliver remarks at a high-roller breakfast fundraiser.
Fresh off meetings at the United Nations, it was clear the president couldn’t take his mind off a certain anonymous whistleblower whose recently declassified complaint has threatened to blow up his administration. According to an attendee at the breakfast, Trump brandished a printed copy of the memo of his now-infamous Ukraine phone call, flaunting it as he blasted Democratic lawmakers for being mean to him. After waving the document around and receiving cheers from the gathering of Republican donors and supporters, the president boasted about how much money—$13 million in 24 hours—he had raised for his reelection effort, the attendee noted.
It was yet another illustration of how President Trump’s big week in New York has been overshadowed and bedeviled by revelations that he and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had urged Ukrainian officials to investigate the son of Joe Biden, the former vice president who remains likely to be Trump’s 2020 election opponent.
Over the past few days, the president has helped raise millions for the 2020 fight and has been lavished with praise by world leaders. And yet, he’s remained, through it all, obsessed over the scandal unfolding back in Washington, D.C., as Democratic members of Congress inched closer to impeachment proceedings. According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Trump has compulsively monitored TV and cable-news coverage of the Ukraine-related scandal, and has repeatedly asked those around him about the whistleblower and rumors that the complainant is hostile to or biased against him.
Through it all, the president’s demeanor and approach to the rapidly unfolding scandal has vacillated between spoiling for a fight to hoping for a détente. Often, it depended on who he was talking to or what setting he found himself in. According to those in attendance at his Thursday breakfast fundraiser, the president was upbeat and fired up, telling donors that he and his political team were ready to punch back hard. In private, however, there was genuine consternation regarding how a brutal impeachment process would affect his legacy and his White House, with much of his staff sharing those same anxieties. Those close to Trump say the president never actually expected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to back any major impeachment moves—at least not until this week.
Though one senior White House aide said the mood there “is fine.” Others said Trump has taken the past week personally, as if Democrats and—what his allies call—the “deep state” had just crashed his party.
On Tuesday, the president took to Twitter to accuse liberals of deliberately ruining and degrading his “important day” at the UN. And according to a Los Angeles Times report, Trump also used his time at a private event for U.S. officials at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York on Thursday morning to rage about the whistleblower and whoever supplied that individual with information.
“I want to know who’s the person—who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said, speaking just as Joseph Maguire, his acting director of national intelligence, testified about the whistleblower complaint detailing allegations that the president pressured the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 election and that White House officials attempted to cover-up records of that call. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason—we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”
It is unclear what actual punishments the president has envisioned and the White House did not provide clarification on this when asked. According to the senior White House official, shortly after the president arrived back at the White House on Thursday, he told his lieutenants that there was no current need to start a “war room” or any special initiative to combat impeachment fever.
A report that Trump was bringing back his former 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to spearhead such an effort, the official said, were an attempt at “self-aggrandizement” by those officials on the outside. And the White House, indeed, subsequently denied the reports. In the president’s inner circle, some continued to believe that the rush to embrace impeachment by Democratic leadership amounted to a politically-tinged bluff.
“This is all theater,” Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lawyers who worked with Giuliani to defend the president during the Mueller probe, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “Nancy Pelosi didn’t announce anything that hasn’t been going on already,” he added, referring to how House Democrats had weeks ago declared they were launching proceedings simply to decide if they should impeach Trump.
While the White House was attempting to project an all-is-calm demeanor, outside groups were preparing for war. According to a senior Republican National Committee official, the RNC’s in-house research team has begun putting together materials to counter-attack House Democrats and a “war room” of its own to deal with Trump impeachment.
As Trump World’s strategy for how to handle growing impeachment woes comes together, the president and his staff will have to adjust to a reality in which even less progress is made on his agenda than was before.
Earlier in the week, a senior administration official bemoaned how much of a gigantic pain impeachment proceedings would be for the White House staff to manage. The official said this is, in part, due to how getting impeached would inevitably devastate President Trump’s focus, mood, actions, and agenda for the remainder of his first term. And White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham has said that “House Democrats have destroyed any chances of legislative progress for the people of this country by continuing to focus” on impeachment.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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