Child President

Report: WH Sent Staff to Fox News to Make Trump Feel Better About Indictments

Written by SK Ashby

Trump hardly tweeted at all last week while the White House was mired in the Rob Porter wife-beating scandal, but he exploded over the weekend with some of the most unhinged rants of his entire time in office.

Not coincidentally, Trump's meltdown followed the indictments unsealed by special prosecutor Robert Mueller on Friday. White House officials and staff knew his reaction to the news was going to be bad and, according to Time, they tried to calm the Toddler-in-Chief down by dispatching staff to Fox News to exonerate him.

Also, he has started tweeting from Marine One.

As soon as Trump was in the air, aboard a Marine helicopter that reaches speeds of 150 miles per hour and has anti-missile systems at the ready, the President unleashed the first of 22 tweets to come between Friday afternoon and Sunday night. “The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!” the initial tweet read, incorrectly stating what the filings actually said — especially for him.

He's not even waiting for "executive time" anymore.

Knowing the President’s fondness for Fox, the White House booked spokesmen to try to direct Trump toward a little less fanciful readings of the indictments.

They didn’t entirely succeed.

On Friday night, spokesman Raj Shah told Tucker Carlson that the indictments said the Russians were trying to “sow confusion” in America without favoring one candidate over another. (The indictment specifically says the Russians sought to hurt Clinton and to promote Trump.) [...]

Then, on Saturday, the White House sent Hogan Gidley on “Fox and Friends,” where he turned on Democrats and the reporters covering this story. “There are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians, and that’s the Democrats and the mainstream media,” Gidley said in a moment that left many Republicans scratching their heads. (“The more I think about a White House official — not a Fox commentator or an RNC hack — saying this, the more appalled I am. He should be fired,” responded former Dan Quayle chief of Staff Bill Kristol. Said former CIA chief Michael Hayden: “Good God almighty.”)

Time reports that Trump spent most of the weekend watching coverage of himself on cable news and became particularly enraged when he was watching the news with his sons Eric and Donald Jr. Trump reportedly blew up at the television and screamed about Hillary Clinton and even the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that occurred just miles from his club.

Time spoke to a dozen White House officials and advisers for this story so I'd say this probably a pretty accurate account of events.