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

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate