JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/ROBERT MUELLER/RUSSIA INVESTIGATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The day after the special counsel delivered his report to the Justice Department, President Trump was ecstatic. He claimed vindication. When he walked into the dining room of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to someone there, guests rose to their feet to give him a standing ovation. A month later, the president’s view of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has grown darker. While Mr. Trump once welcomed it as ‘total exoneration,’ he has spent the last few days assailing it as a ‘total ‘hit job’’ produced by ‘true Trump Haters, including highly conflicted Bob Mueller himself’…His bitterness rarely seems far from the surface. When Mr. Trump showed up in Atlanta later in the day to deliver a speech on opioid abuse, he diverted from the script at a line about stopping the drug industry from ‘rigging the system.’ He grew animated. ‘I know all about the rigging the system because I had the system rigged on me,’ he said. ‘I think you know what I’m talking about.’ In Mr. Trump’s world, there is a fine line between victor and victim. The president often veers back and forth, eager to be seen by others as the former even as he sees himself as the latter.”
–Peter Baker, “Victor or Victim? Trump’s Changing Response to Mueller Report,” The New York Times online, April 24, 2019