Rosenstein Has His Job for Now — Until Trump Needs to Deploy a Major Distraction

After the Kavanaugh-centered political press was briefly taken by the threat that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was about to lose his job, Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett, and Josh Dawsey at the Washington Post report that Rosenstein's job remains safe — for now.

While it remained possible that Rosenstein could still resign or be fired imminently, people inside and outside the department said it seemed increasingly more likely that Rosenstein would stay in the job until after November's elections and then depart, probably along with the attorney general. Two White House officials said Tuesday that Trump is unlikely to fire Rosenstein until after the midterms.

Unless, of course, Trump needs to distract the political press from another unfavorable news story, which is exactly what happened this week, per Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair.

Over the weekend, as Brett Kavanaugh's prospects appeared increasingly imperiled, Trump faced two tactical options, both of them fraught. One was to cut Kavanaugh loose. But he was also looking for ways to dramatically shift the news cycle away from his embattled Supreme Court nominee. According to a source briefed on Trump's thinking, Trump decided that firing Rosenstein would knock Kavanaugh out of the news, potentially saving his nomination and Republicans' chances for keeping the Senate. "The strategy was to try and do something really big," the source said. The leak about Rosenstein's resignation could have been the result, and it certainly had the desired effect of driving Kavanaugh out of the news for a few hours.

"A source briefed on Trump's thinking," who is totally not the president himself, definitely not calling reporters to brag about his cool strategy, for sure not publicly doing a victory lap that he scared the shit out of all reasonable people as a grand manipulation, uh-huh.

Even the threat of firing Rosenstein was a grave abuse of power by a savvy media manipulator, who also happens to be the sitting president.

He has zero respect for the rule of law, democracy, or We the People.

That should have been evident to everyone from the start, but surely it is now, to even his most contemptible apologists in the press.