Friday’s Trump Screwups: September 13, 2019

Edition · September 13, 2019

Friday’s Trump Screwups: September 13, 2019

A historical backfill for America/New_York on the day Trump-world got hit by a fresh legal reversal, a widening Ukraine mess, and more evidence that the president’s instinct for damage control was mostly to make the damage louder.

September 13, 2019 brought a clean little reminder that Trump’s political superpower was often self-inflicted chaos. The biggest hit was a federal appeals court reviving an emoluments lawsuit that threatened to drag his businesses back into the constitutional spotlight. At the same time, the Ukraine whistleblower fight kept tightening around the White House, with House Democrats formalizing their demand for records and signaling that the administration’s stonewalling could not just make the story go away. This was not yet the full explosion that would come later in the month, but the fuse was visibly burning.

Closing take

For one calendar day, the Trump operation managed to look both legally vulnerable and strategically trapped: the more it fought, the more it fed the story. That is the through-line of this edition — a presidency that kept turning defensive moves into fresh evidence of trouble.

Ranked by how bad the fuckup was

5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.

Story

Ukraine whistleblower fight tightens as Democrats push harder on Trump’s wall of secrecy

Ukraine stonewalling Confidence 4/5

★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5 Serious fuckup

The whistleblower episode around Trump’s July call with Ukraine kept getting worse on September 13, as House Democrats moved to subpoena records and publicly warned that the administration’s resistance was obstructing oversight. The story had already escaped its original lane; now it was a formal confrontation over whether the White House would comply with Congress or keep playing hide-and-seek. That made the scandal more durable and more dangerous, because every refusal made the underlying suspicion look more serious.

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Story

Appeals court revives Trump emoluments case and drags his businesses back into the fight

Emoluments revived Confidence 4/5

★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5 Serious fuckup

A federal appeals court revived a lawsuit alleging Trump violated the Constitution’s emoluments ban, reopening a case that had been dismissed on standing grounds. The ruling gave new life to a politically toxic argument that his private businesses and his presidency were never really separable. For Trump, it was another reminder that the courts were not done asking whether the guy running the government was also cashing in on it.

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