Cleaning Up After Trump Is Going To Be A Full-Time Job-- He Really Does Need To Be Impeached So America Can Move Forward

Today's NY Times exposé by Mark Mazzetti, Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Fandos and Michael Schmidt would be the most shocking thing to read about a White House occupant at any time in history... before 2016. Intimidation, Pressure and Humiliation: Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him reads like a crime thriller or a spy thriller. It's way too long for Trump to read or to even have it read to him. Will someone in the White House do a coloring book version? Will Ivanka condense it down to half a page? There are pictures... and a chart. Actually I'm going to try to do that for Ivanka since I'm sure she's busy with... whatever she does.

Matthew Whitaker, who has privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to "jump on a grenade" for Señor Trumpanzee, said he wouldn't be able to grant his boss' wish of putting one of his cronies Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the Southern District of NY, in charge of the escalating investigation of all (criminal) things Trump. So... Trump quickly "soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away." Another in a long list of Trumpy-the-Clown attempts to obstruct justice thwarted!

The Times team makes the point that Trump’s very public war against the Putin-Gate investigation has been almost normalized, "Trump," they wrote "rages almost daily to his 58 million Twitter followers that it's all a treasonous witch hunt against him. That's the public face. But there have been some less public aspects to Trump's attempts to obstruct justice as well-- the basis for this latest exposé, fusing strands that reveal "an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession."

It is a public relations strategy as much as a legal strategy-- a campaign to create a narrative of a president hounded by his “deep state” foes. The new Democratic majority in the House, and the prospect of a wave of investigations on Capitol Hill this year, will test whether the strategy shores up Mr. Trump’s political support or puts his presidency in greater peril. The president has spent much of his time venting publicly about there being “no collusion” with Russia before the 2016 election, which has diverted attention from a growing body of evidence that he has tried to impede the various investigations.

...It was Feb. 14, 2017, and Mr. Trump and his advisers were in the Oval Office debating how to explain the resignation of Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, the previous night. Mr. Flynn, who had been a top campaign adviser to Mr. Trump, was under investigation by the F.B.I. for his contacts with Russians and secret foreign lobbying efforts for Turkey.

The Justice Department had already raised questions that Mr. Flynn might be subject to blackmail by the Russians for misleading White House officials about the Russian contacts, and inside the White House there was a palpable fear that the Russia investigation could consume the early months of a new administration.

As the group in the Oval Office talked, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers mentioned in passing what Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, then the speaker of the House, had told reporters-- that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Flynn to resign.

It was unclear where Mr. Ryan had gotten that information, but Mr. Trump seized on Mr. Ryan’s words. “That sounds better,” the president said, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Trump turned to the White House press secretary at the time, Sean Spicer, who was preparing to brief the news media.

“Say that,” Mr. Trump ordered.

But was that true, Mr. Spicer pressed.

“Say that I asked for his resignation,” Mr. Trump repeated.

The president appeared to have little concern about what he told the public about Mr. Flynn’s departure, and he quickly warmed to the new narrative. The episode was among the first of multiple ham-handed efforts by the president to carry out a dual strategy: publicly casting the Russia story as an overblown hoax and privately trying to contain the investigation’s reach.

“This Russia thing is all over now because I fired Flynn,” Mr. Trump said over lunch that day, according to a new book by Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and a longtime Trump ally.

Mr. Christie was taken aback. “This Russia thing is far from over,” Mr. Christie wrote that he told Mr. Trump, who responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.”

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who was also at the lunch, chimed in, according to Mr. Christie’s book: “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

As Mr. Trump was lunching with Mr. Christie, lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office met with Mr. Spicer about what he should say from the White House podium about what was a sensitive national security investigation. But when Mr. Spicer’s briefing began, the lawyers started hearing numerous misstatements-- some bigger than others-- and ended up compiling them all in a memo.

The lawyers’ main concern was that Mr. Spicer overstated how exhaustively the White House had investigated Mr. Flynn and that he said, wrongly, that administration lawyers had concluded there were no legal issues surrounding Mr. Flynn’s conduct.

Mr. Spicer later told people he stuck to talking points that he was given by the counsel’s office, and that White House lawyers expressed concern only about how he had described the thoroughness of the internal inquiry into Mr. Flynn. The memo written by the lawyers said that Mr. Spicer was presented with a longer list of his misstatements. The White House never publicly corrected the record.

Later that day, Mr. Trump confronted the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in the Oval Office. The president told him that Mr. Spicer had done a great job explaining how the White House had handled the firing. Then he asked Mr. Comey to end the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Flynn, and that Mr. Flynn was a good guy.

Mr. Comey responded, according to a memo he wrote at the time, that Mr. Flynn was indeed a good guy. But he said nothing about ending the F.B.I. investigation.

By March, Mr. Trump was in a rage that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself from the Russia inquiry because investigators were looking into the campaign, of which Mr. Sessions had been a part. Mr. Trump was also growing increasingly frustrated with Mr. Comey, who refused to say publicly that the president was not under investigation.

Mr. Trump finally fired Mr. Comey in May. But the president and the White House gave conflicting accounts of their reasoning for the dismissal, which only served to exacerbate the president’s legal exposure.

A week after the firing, the New York Times disclosed that the president had asked Mr. Comey to end the Flynn investigation. The next day, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed Mr. Mueller, a Republican, as special counsel.

Instead of ending the Russia investigation by firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump had drastically raised the stakes.

Mr. Mueller’s appointment fueled Mr. Trump’s anger and what became increasingly reckless behavior-- triggering a string of actions over the summer of 2017 that could end up as building blocks in a case by Congress that the president engaged in a broad effort to thwart the investigation.

On Twitter and in news media interviews, Mr. Trump tried to pressure investigators and undermine the credibility of potential witnesses in the Mueller investigation.

He directed much of his venom at Mr. Sessions, who had recused himself in March from overseeing the Russia investigation because of contacts he had during the election with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

The president humiliated Mr. Sessions at every turn, and stunned Washington when he said during an interview with The Times that he never would have named Mr. Sessions attorney general if he had known Mr. Sessions would step aside from the investigation.

...One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers also reached out that summer to the attorneys for two of his former aides-- Paul J. Manafort and Mr. Flynn-- to discuss possible pardons. The discussions raised questions about whether the president was willing to offer pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the Mueller investigation.

The president even tried to fire Mr. Mueller himself, a move that could have brought an end to the investigation. Just weeks after Mr. Mueller’s appointment, the president insisted that he ought to be fired because of perceived conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, who would have been responsible for carrying out the order, refused and threatened to quit.

The president eventually backed off.

Gaetz grabs a selfie with Trumpanzee

Sitting in the Delta Sky Lounge during a layover in Atlanta’s airport in July 2017, Representative Matt Gaetz, a first-term Republican from the Florida Panhandle, decided it was time to attack. Mr. Gaetz, then 35, believed that the president’s allies in Congress needed a coordinated strategy to fight back against an investigation they viewed as deeply unfair and politically biased.

He called Representative Gym Jordan, a conservative Republican from Ohio, and told him the party needed “to go play offense,” Mr. Gaetz recalled in an interview.

The two men believed that Republican leaders, who publicly praised the appointment of Mr. Mueller, had been beaten into a defensive crouch by the unending chaos and were leaving Democrats unchecked to “pistol whip” the president with constant accusations about his campaign and Russia.

So they began to investigate the investigators. Mr. Trump and his lawyers enthusiastically encouraged the strategy, which, according to some polls, convinced many Americans that the country’s law enforcement apparatus was determined to bring down the president.

Within days of their conversation, Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Jordan drafted a letter to Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein, the first call for the appointment of a second special counsel to essentially reinvestigate Hillary Clinton for her handling of her emails while secretary of state-- the case had ended in the summer of 2016-- as well as the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation of Mr. Flynn and other Trump associates.

The letter itself, with the signatures of only 20 House Republicans, gained little traction at first. But an important shift was underway: At a time when Mr. Trump’s lawyers were urging him to cooperate with Mr. Mueller and tone down his Twitter feed, the president’s fiercest allies in Congress and the conservative media were busy trying to flip the script on the federal law enforcement agencies and officials who began the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Gym Jordan and Trump, a match made in GOP Heaven

Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Jordan began huddling with like-minded Republicans, sometimes including Representative Mark Meadows, a press-savvy North Carolinian close to Mr. Trump, and Representative Devin Nunes of California, the head of the House Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Nunes, the product of a dairy farming family in California’s Central Valley, had already emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s strongest allies in Congress. He worked closely with Mr. Flynn during the Trump transition after the 2016 election, and he had a history of battling the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, which he sometimes accused of coloring their analysis for partisan reasons. In the spring of 2017, he sought to bolster Mr. Trump’s false claim that President Barack Obama had ordered an illegal wiretap on Trump Tower.

Using Congress’s oversight powers, the Republican lawmakers succeeded in doing what Mr. Trump could not realistically do on his own: forcing into the open some of the government’s most sensitive investigative files-- including secret wiretaps and the existence of an F.B.I. informant-- which were part of the Russia inquiry. House Republicans opened investigationsinto the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case and a debunked Obama-era uranium deal indirectly linked to Mrs. Clinton. The lawmakers got a big assist from the Justice Department, which gave them private text messages recovered from two senior F.B.I. officials who had been on the Russia case. The officials-- Peter Strzok and Lisa Page-- repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump in their texts, which were featured in a loop on Fox News and became a centerpiece of an evolving and powerful conservative narrative about a cabal inside the F.B.I. and Justice Department to take down Mr. Trump.

The president cheered the lawmakers on Twitter, in interviews and in private, urging Mr. Gaetz on Air Force One in December 2017 and in subsequent phone calls to keep up the House Republicans’ oversight work. He was hoping for fair treatment from Mr. Mueller, Mr. Trump told Mr. Gaetz in one of the calls just after the congressman appeared on Fox News, but that did not preclude him from encouraging his allies’ scrutiny of the investigation.

Later, when Mr. Nunes produced a memo alleging that the F.B.I. had abused its authority in spying on a former Trump campaign associate, Carter Page, Mr. Trump called Mr. Nunes a “Great American hero.”(The F.B.I. said it had “grave concerns” about the memo’s accuracy.)

The president became an active participant in the campaign. He repeatedly leaned on administration officials on behalf of the lawmakers-- urging Mr. Rosenstein and other law enforcement leaders to flout procedure and share sensitive materials about the ongoing case with Congress. As president, Mr. Trump has ultimate authority over information that passes through the government, but his interventions were unusual.

By the spring of 2018, Mr. Nunes zeroed in on new targets. In one case, he threatened to hold Mr. Rosenstein in contempt of Congress or even try to impeach him if the documents he wanted were not turned over, including the file used to open the Russia case. In another, he pressed the Justice Department for sensitive information about a trusted F.B.I. informant used in the Russia investigation, a Cambridge professor named Stefan Halper-- even as intelligence officials said that the release of the information could damage relationships with important allies.

...Gaetz makes no apologies.

“Do I think it’s right that our work in the Congress has aided in the president’s defense?” he asked, before answering his own question.

“Yeah, I think it is right.”

Ultimately, his strategy was successful in softening the ground for a shift in the president’s legal strategy-- away from relatively quiet cooperation with Mr. Mueller’s investigators and toward a targeted and relentless frontal attack on their credibility and impartiality.

Last April, Mr. Trump hired Rudolph W. Giuliani, his longtime friend and a famously combative former mayor of New York, as his personal lawyer and ubiquitous television attack dog. A new war had begun.

In jettisoning his previous legal team-- which had counseled that Mr. Trump should cooperate with the investigation-- the president decided to combine a legal strategy with a public-relations campaign in an aggressive effort to undermine the credibility of both Mr. Mueller and the Justice Department.

Mr. Mueller was unlikely to indict Mr. Trump, the president’s advisers believed, so the real danger to his presidency was impeachment-- a political act that Congress would probably only carry out only with broad public support. If Mr. Mueller’s investigation could be discredited, then impeachment might be less likely.

Months of caustic presidential tweets and fiery television interviews by Mr. Giuliani unfolded. The former mayor accused Mr. Mueller, without evidence, of bias and ignoring facts to carry out an anti-Trump agenda. He called one of Mr. Mueller’s top prosecutors, Andrew Weissmann, a “complete scoundrel.”

Behind the scenes, Mr. Giuliani was getting help from a curious source: Kevin Downing, the lawyer for Paul Manafort, who had been the president’s 2016 campaign chairman. Mr. Manafort had agreed to cooperate with the special counsel after being convicted of financial crimes in an attempt to lessen a potentially lengthy prison sentence. Mr. Downing shared details about prosecutors’ lines of questioning, Mr. Giuliani admitted late last year.

It was a highly unusual arrangement-- the lawyer for a cooperating witness providing valuable information to the president’s lawyer at a time when his client remained in the sights of the special counsel’s prosecutors. The arrangement angered Mr. Mueller’s investigators, who questioned what Mr. Manafort was trying to gain from the arrangement.

The attacks on the Mueller investigation appeared to have an effect. Last summer, polling showeda 14-point uptick in the percentage of Americans polled who disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the inquiry. “Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Mr. Giuliani said during an interview in August.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” Mr. Giuliani added. “And my client’s happy.”

But Mr. Giuliani and his client had a serious problem, which they were slow to comprehend.

In April the F.B.I. raided the Manhattan office and residences of Mr. Cohen-- the president’s lawyer and fixer-- walking off with business records, emails and other documents dating back years. At first, Mr. Trump wasn’t concerned.

The president told advisers that Mr. Rosenstein assured him at the time that the Cohen investigation had nothing to do with him. In the president’s recounting, Mr. Rosenstein told him that the inquiry in New York was about Mr. Cohen’s business dealings, it did not involve the president and was not about Russia. Since then, Mr. Trump has asked his advisers if Mr. Rosenstein was deliberately misleading him to keep him calm.

Mr. Giuliani initially portrayed Mr. Cohen as “honest,” and Mr. Trump praised him publicly. But Mr. Cohen soon told prosecutors in New York how Mr. Trump had ordered him during the 2016 campaign to buy the silence of women who claimed they had sex with the president. In a separate bid for leniency, Mr. Cohen told Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors about Mr. Trump’s participation in negotiations during the height of the presidential campaign to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Mr. Trump was now battling twin investigations that seemed to be moving ever close to him. And Mr. Cohen, once the president’s fiercest defender, was becoming his chief tormentor.

In a court appearance in August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty and told a judge that Mr. Trump had ordered him to arrange the payments to the women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Mr. Cohen’s descriptions of the president’s actions made Mr. Trump, in effect, an unindicted co-conspirator and raised the prospect of the president being charged after he leaves office. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who in January became the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the matter, said the implied offense was probably impeachable.

The president struck back, launching a volley of tweets that savaged Mr. Cohen and his family-- insinuating that Mr. Cohen’s father-in-law had engaged in unexamined criminal activity. He called Mr. Cohen a “rat.” The messages infuriated Democratic lawmakers, who claimed the president was trying to threaten and intimidate a witness ahead of testimony Mr. Cohen planned before Congress.

“He’s only been threatened by the truth,” the president responded.

As the prosecutors closed in, Mr. Trump felt a more urgent need to gain control of the investigation.

He made the call to Mr. Whitaker to see if he could put Mr. Berman in charge of the New York investigation. The inquiry is run by Robert Khuzami, a career prosecutor who took over after Mr. Berman, whom Mr. Trump appointed, recused himself because of a routine conflict of interest.

What exactly Mr. Whitaker did after the call is unclear, but there is no evidence that he took any direct steps to intervene in the Manhattan investigation. He did, however, tell some associates at the Justice Department that the prosecutors in New York required “adult supervision.”

Second, Mr. Trump moved on to a new attorney general, William P. Barr, whom Mr. Trump nominated for the job in part because of a memo Mr. Barr wrote last summer making a case that a sitting American president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice for acts well within his power-- like firing an F.B.I. director.

A president cannot be found to have broken the law, Mr. Barr argued, if he was exercising his executive powers to fire subordinates or use his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding.”

The memo might have ingratiated Mr. Barr to his future boss, but Mr. Barr is also respected among the rank and file in the Justice Department. Many officials there hope he will try to change the Trump administration’s combative tone toward the department as well as the F.B.I.

Whether it is too late is another question. Mr. Trump's language, and allegations of “deep state” excesses, are now embedded in the political conversation, used as a cudgel by the president’s supporters.

This past December, days before Mr. Flynn was to be sentenced for lying to the F.B.I., his lawyers wrote a memo to the judge suggesting that federal agents had tricked the former national security adviser into lying. The judge roundly rejected that argument, and on sentencing day he excoriated Mr. Flynn for his crimes.

The argument about F.B.I. trickery did, however, appear to please the one man who holds great power over Mr. Flynn’s future-- the constitutional power to pardon.

“Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn,” Mr. Trump tweeted cheerily on the morning of the sentencing.

Yeah... couldn't do the synopsis version for Ivanka the way I planned. Too much important stuff here. And Saudi Arabia... that's a very big deal on top of all this. We'll have to get more into that one. I'd trust Ro to make sure everyone in the country understands exactly with Trump and his little cabal have been up to with the Saudis.

The Tweet That Did In Putin's Puppet?

Trump is now admitting there was, after all, some collusion. And it was Idiot, Jr. and Kushner-in-law who were doing the colluding, Trump personally covering up for them and Trump probably directing the collusion, or to put it more accurately, the conspiracy to commit treason. Just look at the Trump tweet from yesterday above. His wonderful son held a meeting with Russian spies "to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics." It's not legal. It never happens. And it won't be long before all the details of Trump's participation come spilling out. And if it was so legal and commonplace, why has Trump been lying about it so assiduously? Not only that, but who else has he dragged into the coverup conspiracy? Well, the bullshit about "the adoption iff Russian children" was invented by Trump with help from two of Trump's crooked lawyers, Jay Sekulow and Marc Kasowitz (who will both be disbarred over this), another crooked attorney Alan Futerfas, employed by Idiot, Jr and also likely to be disbarred, as well as Hope Hicks, Josh Raffel... oh, and Kushner and Ivanka. Those are the conspirators we know about so far. I met Mueller has twice as many lined up. No one ever believed this bullshit anyway-- except for the deranged Trumpists who believe the Q-Anon claim that when Trump says "Muller and 17 angry Democrats," he's signaling them because Q is the 17th letter iff the alphabet.

We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up... [it was] a short introductory meeting.

Sekulow isn't as stupid as Trump and he sees what's headed his way so he started to worms his way out of his role in the conspiracy by claiming he "had bad information." Yesterday, Adam Davidson's essay for the New Yorker, The Day Trump Told Us There Was Attempted Collusion With Russia makes us eager for Rachel Maddow's show tonight. Davidson took great pleasure to point out that it was August 5 (1974) that the whole Nixon conspiracy came apart at the seams. Saturday, when Trump tweeted his admission, was exactly 44 years to the day!

The tweet contains several crucial pieces of information. First, it is a clear admission that Donald Trump, Jr.,’s original statement about the case was inaccurate enough to be considered a lie. He had said the meeting was with an unknown person who “might have information helpful to the campaign,” and that this person “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” This false statement was, according to his legal team, dictated by the President himself. There was good reason to mislead the American people about that meeting. Based on reporting-- at the time and now-- of the President’s admission, it was a conscious effort by the President’s son and two of his closest advisers to work with affiliates of the Russian government to obtain information that might sway the U.S. election in Trump’s favor. In short, it was, at minimum, a case of attempted collusion. The tweet indicates that Trump’s defense will continue to be that this attempt at collusion failed-- “it went nowhere”-- and that, even if it had succeeded, it would have been “totally legal and done all the time.” It is unclear why, if the meeting was entirely proper, it was important for the President to declare “I did not know about it!” or to tell the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to “stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now.”

The President’s Sunday-morning tweet should be seen as a turning point. It doesn’t teach us anything new-- most students of the case already understand what Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner knew about that Trump Tower meeting. But it ends any possibility of an alternative explanation. We can all move forward understanding that there is a clear fact pattern about which there is no dispute:

• The President’s son and top advisers knowingly met with individuals connected to the Russian government, hoping to obtain dirt on their political opponent.
• Documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and members of the Clinton campaign were later used in an overt effort to sway the election.
• When the Trump Tower meeting was uncovered, the President instructed his son and staff to lie about the meeting, and told them precisely which lies to use.
• The President is attempting to end the investigation into this meeting and other instances of attempted collusion between his campaign staff and representatives of the Russian government.

It was possible, just days ago, to believe-- with an abundance of generosity toward the President and his team-- that the meeting was about adoption, went nowhere, and was overblown by the Administration’s enemies. No longer. The open questions are now far more narrow: Was this a case of successful or only attempted collusion? Is attempted collusion a crime? What legal and moral responsibilities did the President and his team have when they realized that the proposed collusion was underway when the D.N.C. e-mails were leaked and published? And, crucially, what did the President know before the election, after it, and when he instructed his son to lie?

Earlier on Sunday, Trump wrote another tweet, one that repeated a common refrain: journalists are the enemy of the people. “I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People,” it read. In a way, he did provide a great service. He allowed us to move away from a no-longer-relevant debate about whether or not he and his campaign had done anything wrong. Our nation can now focus on another question: What do we do when a President has openly admitted to attempted collusion, lying, and a coverup?

As David From tweeted yesterday about Trump and his close knit advisors-- a quickie summary of what conspired and what we now all know about what Trump insisted for a year was "no collusion":

• They knew they would be meeting with representatives of the Russian state.
• They knew they were being offered Russian state intelligence.
• They intended to use Russian intelligence offered by Russian agents against an American opponents.
• They did not alert the FBI.

Sounds like a treasonous conspiracy to me. So... call me crazy, but this very much looks like enough reason to me to put off the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Trump almost entirely because he believes presidents are above the law and can't be punished. I wonder if Trump and Kavanaugh made a deal about whether or not a president's immediate family is also above the law. Trump must be especially worried about Idiot, Jr, the family Fredo.

What is it about Idiot, Jr, asked Katie McDonough in February, "that makes him sound like such a terrible asshole?" And she meant "sound" quite literally. And now that's he's going to have to make a good impression on a jury, we might all be wondering the same thing. She asked Brendan Houdek, the head of speech pathology at New York Speech Coaching. Although he mentioned that Idiot, Jr. has "a bit of a lower pitch to his voice as well as his resonance, which is a bit of a darker tone, a darker timbre," that makes his voice sound slightly manufactured, "like he is trying to be that authoritative speaker-- forcing that voice a little lower, forcing that resonance a little darker-- that comes across as hyper-polished." He's very rehearsed, even forced, stiff in his posture.

[McDonough:] I interviewed one of your colleagues last year about White House advisor Stephen Miller and how he also sounds like a complete dick. Because again, people can hold their same views but not sound this way. Jeff Sessions is also racist, but his speech is syrupy and sweet. There is something similar about Miller and Trump, then. A gendered kind of speech performance that feels very inauthentic.

[Houdek:] There are some gender stereotypes that exist in our culture. For men, they naturally gravitate toward that because it’s their impression, if you will, of a confident speaker. They try to emulate it, but it often ends up being a poor emulation. So for someone like Stephen Miller, there is going to be more of that attempt at being committed and confident and instead it comes across as more monotonous, trying to force that tone of voice lower. And that can sound how you described it.

...The linguistic choices they make are fairly similar, but Donald Trump Jr. is Donald Trump lite, in these aspects. By that I mean, just linguistically, Donald Trump’s way of speaking, he has many non sequitur, parenthetical statements, false starts.

But if you watch Donald Trump Jr. in an interview setting, you can see him do that in a similar way. Again, not to the same extent, but he does have these moments where he will start a topic, then go to another, then go to another. I think it is a conscious or subconscious attempt to dance around the topic a bit and avoid what is actually being addressed. But, in a sense, he is a poor emulation of his father’s way of doing things. I think the way that we sense that is due to their level of commitment. Donald Trump Jr., you might see moments, whether in his inflection or body language and facial expression, that show he is backtracking a bit. That he is changing topics because he is trying to avoid another, but you don’t see that in Donald Trump Sr. because of the commitment factor.

Not doctored-- before they started having work done, in fact

[McDonough:] One sounds horrible and natural, and one sounds horrible and alienating.

[Houdek:] For better or for worse, what you are saying about Donald Trump Sr. is what attracted many people to him. There wasn’t that polish, that forced quality of speech. With Trump Jr., you see that polish, that trying too hard. Humans can recognize that. Even if we can’t put our finger on it we recognize it: I don’t believe him.

[McDonough:] If you were going to do a coaching session with Donald Trump Jr. and wanted to help him sound like less of an asshole, what would you advise him to do?

[Houdek:] I would address some of the things we discussed together. If I felt the voice was a bit forced in terms of the register he was trying to speak in, I would do one of two things: one, raise that register just a bit to be in a more comfortable range or make him aware of the physiological behaviors that he is doing that make it sound so forced. We can manipulate the sound of our voice, that is something we work on here, called speaking voice enhancement. If he wanted to speak in that register, he could do that, but the tongue is a bit too far back, it’s a bit too crunched. Let’s bring it forward a bit so it sounds a bit more relaxed and less forced.

And the linguistic choices, for example. When he is changing topic, I might help him to keep his sentences more concise. I would also really focus on that commitment factor, the subtle body language cues and facial expressions that show he is putting on an act instead of seeming genuine about the message he is trying to communicate.