“No one scares President Trump as much as people who used to work for him,” explains Windsor Mann at The Week. They would be his Kryptonite if he were the genetically superior Superman of his ravings. But that would require he champion truth, justice and the American way. Not bloody likely.
Mr. “America First” is on trial for trying to coerce a foreign government into investigating a couple of U.S. citizens that as president he was sworn to defend.
Trump’s assembled Ministry of Truth on Monday spent its time in the well of the Senate smearing Joe Biden and Barack Obama. If he couldn’t get the Ukrainians to do it, Trump would turn his impeachment trial into a day-long attack ad. Anything to distract from headlines surrounding former national security adviser John Bolton’s unpublished manuscript for “The Room Where It Happened.“
The president told Bolton he “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens,” the New York Times reported Sunday. On Monday, the Times supplemented that with the revelation Bolton had expressed concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr last August that Trump was “effectively granting personal favors to the autocratic leaders of Turkey and China.”
Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman write:
Mr. Bolton’s account underscores the fact that the unease about Mr. Trump’s seeming embrace of authoritarian leaders, long expressed by experts and his opponents, also existed among some of the senior cabinet officers entrusted by the president to carry out his foreign policy and national security agendas.
Trump is making nice with autocrats hoping they’ll let the addled wannabe into their he-man’s club. Not bloody likely.
Trump’s Minitrue attorneys want to disappear that and more down the memory hole. “The Republicans would like to pretend that the past doesn’t exist, and also that the future won’t exist,” Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate. They are trying to isolate the case to the events of the July 25 Ukraine call, cherry-picking bits of the prosecution case to attack it and ignoring “mountains of corroborating testimonial evidence, leaked emails, and ongoing media reports, all of which establish a clear timeline of the Ukraine scandal.” None of that appears in the White House call summary. (Despite the loose use of the term, we’ve never seen an actual call transcript.)
Where addressing statements from former employees is unavoidable, Team Trump deploys a couple of standard memory-hole flushes. Bolton is trying “to sell a book.” Anthony Scaramucci is “a disgruntled employee.”
Another dodge the man with “the world’s greatest memory” tries, Mann writes, is to deny knowing the person making unfavorable claims against him. “I don’t know him at all,” Trump says of Lev Parnas, indicted for campaign finance felonies. Parnas produced a string of photos of the two together and an email from Trump attorney Jay Sekulow saying Trump had approved John Dowd defending him.
Paul Manafort? Trump claims he barely knows him. Manafort ran his presidential campaign for “a very short period of time.” Manafort is serving a 7.5-year federal prison sentence for tax and bank fraud charges and for conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Down the memory hole.
Even if Senate Republicans ultimately acquit Trump, Republicans who would rather tout the economy this election season must beat back revelations that, if Trump’s Senate firewall against witnesses testifying breaches, threaten to expose what everyone knows about him but refuses to see or hear. Buried drainpipes can only pass so much so fast before they back up and overflow into the daylight.
The memory hole is choking.
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