Analysis: Trump's old ways colliding with new realities
NEW YORK (AP) — Telling half-truths and outright lies. Manipulating media coverage. Pushing legal boundaries. Pressuring subordinates to do the dirty work. Believing in the force of his own personality. Accepting no personal responsibility.
The playbook Donald Trump has used as a real estate developer, celebrity businessman and political candidate has, for the most part, proved effective through the first two-plus years of his presidency.
He has shown an uncanny ability to wriggle out of jams that might have doomed just about any of his predecessors.
That M.O. may finally be catching up to Trump amid the House's impeachment inquiry. The tactics that helped win the White House have jeopardized his hold on it, ensnaring him in accusations that he enlisted a foreign government to investigate a political foe and, so far, leaving him flailing against a rapidly escalating investigation.
"He's arrived at a very different place right now. He's being held to account in a way that he never had before and is running into the limits of what he normally does," said Tim O'Brien, a Trump biographer and frequent critic. "The Trump we're used to seeing is someone whose visceral feeling to survive is to plow through public criticism to just push forward. His behavior hasn't changed, his circumstance has."
It was Trump's ability to get out of one predicament that led him into this one.
The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference shadowed the White House for two years before ending with a whimper on July 24, when the former FBI director's faltering testimony seemed to close the book on the inquiry. Mueller told Congress that he could not exonerate the president on obstruction of justice, and Trump told the world that he had been completely...