Would you let the President of the United States babysit your kids? You really ought to ask yourself. And if you doubt he can handle that kind of responsibility, what are we even doing here?
It's worth asking, again, because the world's most powerful man hosted the children of the White House Press Corps Thursday for Take Our Daughters and Our Sons to Work Day. "That's the politically correct term, and we always have to be politically correct, right?" he said. "So that's good." Then he told the kids he likes them better than their parents—because their parents are journalists, and he has launched a hate movement against journalists. Then he talked about his limo and how dogs are the best drug-detection equipment the world has ever seen. This mirrored a speech on opioid addiction he gave Wednesday, in which he also raved about dogs and the dress Melania wore to his inauguration, which was a segue into a rant about the border. Also this week, he tweeted more than 50 times in one day.
But it was all a stage rehearsal for his interview Thursday evening with Sean Hannity, the Shadow Chief of Staff. Yes, this is our world: people like Hannity and Lou Dobbs, the Fashy Benjamin Button, are among the president's closest advisers. Donald Trump, American president, called into Hannity's show mid-segment last night—surely causing panic in the control room—and the two strolled together through the baroque architecture of conspiratorial nonsense they've built together over the last few years. At this point, it's come to resemble an entire alternate reality.
Hannity and Trump are pushing conspiracy theories about the Obama-era Justice Department.
"Really it's a coup," Trump says, before admitting that his (unfounded) claim about the Obama DOJ wiretapping him was based on "a little bit of a hunch." pic.twitter.com/WFCi3SjIRN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019
"Really, it's a coup, it's spying, it's everything you can imagine," Trump mused about these invented activites of the Obama Justice Department, saying the quiet parts out loud: call it whatever makes it seem worst. The truth of the matter is functionally irrelevant. It doesn't factor in. What's good for me? Say that. Trump unwittingly expounded on his worldview—the truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe—when he moved into a discussion of his entirely fabricated charge that the Obama administration "wiretapped" him.
"Early on, I used the word "wiretap," and I put it in quotes, meaning surveillance, spying—you can sort of say whatever. But that was a long time ago...two years ago, when I said that on a little bit of a hunch, and a little bit of wisdom, it blew up. Because maybe they thought I was wise to 'em and they were caught."
Here the president is openly admitting he accused his predecessor of illegally surveilling his campaign with zero evidence. He says he had "a hunch," presumably thinking this imparts some Hardy Boys charm to the idea the American president manufactures serious—and possibly criminal—accusations against his political opponents out of thin air. Then, when people grow concerned that he is quite obviously making all this up, he interprets their concern as evidence his entirely fabricated claim is correct. No wonder he once again promoted the baseless conspiracy theory that British intelligence helped in this effort earlier this week—an accusation that caused an international incident the last time he trotted it out. He doesn't care whether it's true. He doesn't even consider it.
"It was pretty insignificant, I thought, when I said it," the President of the United States says, referring to when he suggested his predecessor carried out an extralegal surveillance campaign against him, presumably in an attempt to sway a democratic election. It's almost like he doesn't see any boundaries in what you can do or say to win—and assumes everyone else is operating on the same calculus. It's against this backdrop that we're supposed to just accept the president's talk of a "coup" against him, which is always nice to hear from The Leader of an authoritarian movement.
Next, the president claimed Hillary Clinton sent "hundreds of thousands of text messages or emails through the Weiner server, or computer," suggesting "many" were classified. This is largely inaccurate: a small number of emails Clinton sent or received contained classified information, and Trump seems to be confusing Clinton's private email server with Anthony Weiner's laptop, which contained some emails sent to his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide. But the intent is clear: Trump wants to swing the criminal investigation of his conduct back on Hillary Clinton. Perhaps that's what he means when he talks about whether the attorney general—a position now occupied by his pet toad, William Barr—"will do what's right." After all, we learned this week that the president repeatedly demanded that Jeff Sessions prosecute Hillary Clinton for...something. Like all authoritarian leaders, the president believes the justice system is just a tool at his disposal, with which he can punish his adversaries.
With Hannity, Trump told a story to illustrate the injustice of Clinton's non-prosecution.
"Nothing happens to her, and yet they put a young sailor on for doing something innocent—showing his mother and his friend what the desks look like, the desk in a 40-year-old submarine. I think Russia and China would've had that picture, many years ago".
Uh, what? This appears to refer to a recurring Fox meme, where the story of a sailor who went to prison for taking photos on a nuclear submarine becomes about Hillary Clinton.
But then we were moving on. The president, who refused to sit for an interview with Robert Mueller, and whose lawyers submitted written responses on "Russia-related" questions that contained 37 instances in which the president "could not recall," and who refused to submit even written answers to questions on obstruction, complained about Hillary Clinton's FBI interview over The Emails. Then things took a darker turn.
Trump accuses Hillary Clinton of "destroying the lives of people that were on our campaign. She's destroyed their lives."
"This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government," the president adds, referring to the Mueller probe. pic.twitter.com/Uvfcr1mQeo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2019
Here the President of the United States is once again accusing his political opponents of orchestrating a coup against him. Not only did Clinton "destroy the lives" of people on his campaign—presumably by making a bunch of them lie to the FBI, or in the case of Paul Manafort, convincing him to become a gun-for-hire for dictators and despots the world over—but the Mueller probe was "an attempted overthrow of the United States government." This is the same probe that ended in The Mueller Report, which Trump called a COMPLETE EXONERATION! until it actually came out.
This is a classic scenario, after all: when a shadowy cabal wants to overthrow a government, they often stage a meticulous two-year investigation and then decline to press charges against the official they're desperate to remove from office, choosing instead to refer the matter to Congress, which his allies partly control, to decide on.
Trump spent much of the rest of the 45-minute interview—because, again, he has nothing better to do—repeating the word "coup." This will surely end well. He crowed about an upcoming Justice Department Inspector General report, telegraphing that he will use it as a political weapon. He returned to the Spying-Slash-Wiretap-Slash-Surveillance meme, praising his pet toad:
'The attorney general said it better than anybody the other day when he was asked. "Yes, I think they were spying on the Trump campaign." You can't say it any better than that."
Notice he just says the toad said it well. He sold it. It's not relevant whether it's true. "I think so, too," the president added, driving home that this is all based on his "hunch"—also known as a thought that popped into his head.
The concerns about the president's mental fitness and his assault on the institutions of our republic are now thoroughly intertwined. Donald Trump has always been a primal operator, but he has now reverted to full-on fight-or-flight. He is lashing out wildly because he can feel the perilous position that he is in. It's not the first time for someone who has spent his entire adult life exploring the shadowy corners of the law—and, based on the fact that pretty much every organization he's ever run is now under investigation, perhaps has found himself on the wrong side of it. He will fight like hell to avoid accountability for his actions, and his track record indicates he could easily be successful. The question is whether the republic will fight back, which will require the moral courage of people—in particular the Republican Senate—who have so far been sorely lacking.
