In the White House things are looking bad. This could be the beginning of the end for Trump

The Trump administration cannot seem to get itself out of this perpetual, full-blown crisis mode

Nash Riggins
Thursday 02 March 2017 14:53 GMT
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Sessions won’t even be the first big fish that Trump will have been forced to gut and sacrifice to the gods of politics in order to save his own skin
Sessions won’t even be the first big fish that Trump will have been forced to gut and sacrifice to the gods of politics in order to save his own skin (Getty)

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Donald Trump has done plenty of flip-flopping over the course of his unlikely rise to power. He’s changed his mind multiple times about repealing Obamacare, prosecuting his political opponents for no reason and whether he should spend $500bn deporting millions of people nobody can find. It’s actually pretty difficult to keep up.

Yet against all odds, the one election promise Trump cannot seem to let go of is the claim he’ll “drain the swamp” of big politics and eradicate any and all trace of corruption in Washington. It was a great campaign slogan, and millions of Americans really bought into it. For whatever reason, they truly believed a greasy Manhattan billionaire with a penchant for running businesses into the ground could help clean up politics.

Six weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, and that corrupt political bog we all used to scoff at has devolved into a muddy hellscape covered in smog so thick you couldn’t cut it with a knife. Instead of draining that swamp, the President has spent the past month and a bit needlessly bending over backwards to prove to us all just how great he is at wallowing within one.

Seriously, it seems like one of Trump’s minions tosses a little more dirt in the pit every day – and if Trump doesn’t start cracking the whip and cleaning house soon, this mess he’s creating for himself will inevitably send the guy packing long before we stumble into 2020.

Trump’s latest migraine? It turns out his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, lied under oath to Congress about palling around with the Russian government.

To be fair, Jeff Sessions has always been a dodgy guy – least of all because he’s a climate change sceptic who voted against banning torture and has allegedly missed out on jobs before in the past for making racist jokes and slagging off the NAACP.

But when you’re America’s new chief lawyer and supreme authority on justice and moral integrity, you’ve got to admit that lying under oath is hitting a new low. And bearing in mind it’s Sessions who’s supposedly leading an FBI investigation into whether the Russians cheated the American people by tipping November’s general election in favour of his orange boss, it’s not hard to see why Democrats and Republicans alike are now calling for his head to roll.

Almost every big claim Trump made at address to Congress was false

With any luck, it will – and Sessions won’t even be the first big fish that Trump will have been forced to gut and sacrifice to the gods of politics in order to save his own skin. Hell, just a few days after Trump took the helm, one of his top national security advisers got fired for illegally talking shop with the exact same Russian guy Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about never having met with.

Vladimir Putin is probably jumping for joy, because the last time Russia was this culturally relevant, Milli Vanilli reigned supreme on the Billboard charts. But somewhere in that horrible bog we’re still calling Pennsylvania Avenue, the mood is considerably more sombre – because the Trump administration simply cannot seem to get itself out of this perpetual, full-blown crisis mode.

The President is currently sitting on about four dozen lawsuits against him, executive orders are getting blown out of the water by court judges, his aides are dropping like flies and now one of his right hand men has been caught lying on camera and under oath about potential dirty dealings with a country Trump’s own party thinks is America’s “number one geopolitical foe”.

Every time it looks like things can’t get any worse for Donald Trump, he always manages to surprise us with another unconstitutional doozy. He’s really got quite a knack for it. But if Trump wants to stay in power for the next four years and keep his fragmented support base in one piece, he’d better start treading a bit more carefully.

After all, even Republicans can only handle so many lies before they start to lose patience – and a swamp can only get so muddy before nature decides to take its own course.

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