MSNBS host Joy Reid wrote a scathing op-ed piece for The Daily Beast on Saturday in which she excoriated the "crumbling" Trump administration and said there's "only one man to blame" for the mess, President Donald Trump himself.
Citing Friday's series of bombshell revelations -- on top of the administration's already long list of scandals and blunders -- Reid said, "It’s all very intriguing, suggesting a presidency that is crumbling before our eyes under the weight of its inherent corruption. And the sheer, leaked disgust of his own team makes it clear that even Trump loyalists understand that there is only one man to blame."
"Moscow Don," as Reid called him, can't stop cozying up to Russian officials and "can’t stop loving on his fired National Security Adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, who reportedly confessed to the incoming administration that he was under FBI investigation for his shady dealings with Turkey and Russia, but got hired anyway."
She also blasted Vice Pres. Mike Pence, saying that the evangelical Christian ex-Indiana governor is equally implicated in dealings with the Russians or he's the dumbest man in Washington.
"We are asked to believe Mike Pence, the head of the transition team, heard this confession and the warnings about Flynn from the then-acting attorney general with his index fingers stuck firmly in his little lamb ears," she wrote.
Last week, Reid lambasted Pence, saying that he was the leader of Trump's transition team and as such was in charge of properly vetting and screen nominees.
"Mike Pence has a very implausible story as well, which is that he knew absolutely nothing about anything ever, including when Sally Yates comes in and informs the transition team, of which he’s the head! He’s the head of the transition team! The idea that he was completely and wholly ignorant makes him also unfit to succeed Donald Trump even if Congress did have a mind to impeach him," Reid said on "Hardball."
"It’s all a mess," she wrote on Saturday, "but one that was predictable with the election of a needy and juvenile man who won’t read more than a page of bullet points with his name sprinkled liberally throughout to keep him interested, and who brags without thinking in order to make people like him—even if the people are spies for a hostile power—and who’s friendlier with the thuggish autocrats of Turkey, Egypt, and the Philippines than with Canada."
And while Trump is neither an original or fluid thinker, said Reid, he has a canny kind of survival instinct that has him keeping Flynn close because if Flynn or former Trump 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort turns on the president, they post post a "clear and present danger" to the administration.
"He repeatedly tried to recruit Comey into The Family to keep Comey from bringing him down. He’s keeping the whole band of misfits on the ship to keep them from scratching out holes in the hull," said Reid.
She concluded, "The problem is that Trump thinks the danger of Russiagate is merely to his plan and to his pride; his desperate need to believe he won the election because of his sheer awesomeness and not through a confluence of unfortunate events. What he fails to comprehend is that the real danger is to his presidency itself, and to the country he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to lead."
