What the Meadows texts reveal about Trump's secret life

One myth of the Trump years has been that his crimes and the crimes of his Band of Crazy Compatriots were committed in plain sight.  Trump’s rants at his rallies were remarkable, we were told again and again, because he gets up there and tells you what he’s going to do.  Some pundits thought it started during the 2016 campaign, when Trump would come right out and encourage his followers to beat up anti-Trump protesters who occasionally showed up among them.  In Iowa, he told a rally, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, seriously.  Just knock the hell out of…I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.  I promise.  I promise.”

For a time, Trump’s in-your-face rabble-rousing and encouragement of violence passed for honesty.  He’ll say things other people think but won’t come out and say, went the thinking.  When two of his top campaign aides got in trouble with the FBI, Trump “sent private and public messages to Flynn encouraging him to stay strong and conveying that the President still cared about him before he began to cooperate with the government," Special Counsel Robert Mueller found in his final report.  “With respect to Manafort…the President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the President did not want Manafort to 'flip' and cooperate with the government," Mueller found.

Former Michigan U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, a frequent legal commentator on MSNBC, wrote a major piece for the Daily Beast entitled, “Trump may be committing obstruction of justice in plain sight.” 

“Trump…seems to be attempting to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation in broad daylight. Why? It may be a deliberate strategy to maintain deniability. By using Twitter and public remarks to intimidate investigators and delegitimize law enforcement, Trump may be attempting to negate the ability of prosecutors to prove an essential element of an obstruction charge: corrupt intent. If he were intending to obstruct justice, the strategy goes, would he have done so publicly? Of course not! Therefore, he lacks the requisite intent to commit the crime.”

It happened again during the Ukraine scandal.  Trump came right out and told Ukrainian President Zelensky that all he needed was an “investigation” of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and everything would be peachy.  He’d release the weapons promised to Ukraine’s army, and all would be well.  Efforts to impeach Trump for “high crimes and misdemeanors” related to the Ukraine scandal came to naught, at least in part because he had been seen directing the actions of his co-conspirator Giuliani “in plain sight,” so how could that have been wrong?  Nobody in his right mind commits crimes out in the open,” Trump’s defenders said.

When he lost the election of 2020, Trump made repeated statements that could be interpreted, and were interpreted, as trying to influence state recounts in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and other states where he had lost by narrow margins, which amounts to a federal crime we’ve been told.  He invited legislators from Michigan and Pennsylvania to the White House and tried to convince them to seat Republican slates of electors in their states, and he didn’t hide it.  The story of what he was up to was told by White House reporters in real time.

And then came January 6, when as he did repeatedly at campaign rallies in 2016 and 2020, Trump got up in front of a crowd of his followers on the Ellipse and came right out and said what he wanted them to do.  They were to be “tough” and march on the Capitol and show those lily-livered members of Congress what they need to do.  In December, in the run-up to the rally when he was ginning-up support to overturn the election, he tweeted to his followers urging them to come to Washington on the 6th, “Be there.  Be wild!”  There he went again, inciting a riot in plain sight.

Aging pundits who had been around for Watergate even pointed out that everything Nixon did in secret, Trump seemed willing to do out in the open.  That was the difference between the two men, it was said.  Trump was shameless while Nixon was obsessively secretive.

The Meadows texts show the secretive side of Trumpworld.  While Trump and his entire party were publicly playing down the insurrection as a “peaceful tourist visit,” behind the scenes Fox News anchors, members of Trump’s family, and members of Congress were trading texts proving that they knew exactly what was going on and why.  CNN helpfully summed up the texts this way: 

"He's got to condemn this shit ASAP," Don Jr. wrote. "We need an Oval office address."

"Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home," Ingraham wrote.  "This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy."

"Can he make a statement?" asked Hannity. "Ask people to leave the Capitol."

"Please, get him on TV," begged Fox & Friends' Kilmeade. "Destroying everything you have accomplished."

Nobody – not Meadows, not Hannity, not Suckling Son No. 1 Don Jr. – none of them ever thought what they said privately would see the light of day.  Trump himself famously has never written a single email, but it’s obvious that plenty of them were written on his behalf.  Which makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else is out there.

There have always been two Trumps, one for public consumption, and one behind the closed doors of Beverly Hills Hotel suites, Trump Tower offices, the Oval Office, and out on the golf course where I’ve always been convinced the great majority of Trump’s secret life has always been lived.  Why do you think the White House press pool was never…never…allowed to photograph him during his golf games?  Why do you think the names of his “golfing partners” were never revealed to the press?  Why do you think his White House schedule was frequently a blank slate upon which the words “Executive Time” were typed again and again and again?  We’ll never find out how many times he spoke to Vladimir Putin on the phone.  We’ll never find out what Trump did when he walked down the stairs of Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane. 

In fact, every time there’s been a crack in the door to Trump’s secret life, what peeked out has been sordid, disgusting, criminal, and usually all three at once.  

There are more text messages from Meadows to come, we’re told by the Jan. 6 committee.  Members of Congress who sent them as they cowered in their offices afraid for their lives will be named.  I can’t wait.