Warping reality or just warped?
Donald Trump faces a series of civil and criminal trials in the coming years that will tax both his Roy Cohn-ish practice of denying, deflecting and distracting and his Norman Vincent Peale-inspired approach to bending reality to his will.
Not that he won’t send out his bargain-basement attorneys to sell us a dead parrot (New York Times):
Appearing on five television networks Sunday morning, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued that his actions in the effort to overturn the 2020 election fell short of crimes and were merely “aspirational.”
The remarks from his lawyer, John F. Lauro, came as Mr. Trump was blanketing his social media platform, Truth Social, with posts suggesting that his legal team was going to seek the recusal of Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the case, and try to move his trial out of Washington.
Trump’s efforts to pressure his vice president and state elections officials into overturning the 2020 election results were merely aspirational. And the “Norwegian Blue” is just resting.
Trump did not “direct Vice President Pence to do anything,” Lauro told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He asked him in an aspirational way,” Lauro said. “Asking is not action. It’s core free speech.”
There it is: Team Trump’s free speech defense.
Mr. Lauro used the same defense on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about Mr. Trump’s now-infamous call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. During that call, President Trump pressured Mr. Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” to win the state and suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could face criminal repercussions if he did not.
“That was an aspirational ask,” Mr. Lauro said.
Like the hoodlum’s “aspirational” demand in Jack Benny’s classic “Your Money or Your Life” bit.
Lauro did not appear on five Sunday talking-heads shows to make a legal defense of Trump, but a political one. The amount of evidence piled up against Trump both by the January 6th Committee investigation and by special prosecutor Jack Smith’s is daunting. The Raffensperger tape is devastating. Pence’s inevitable testimony and contemporaneous notes will be tough to refute. Jurors may have to suppress laughter if Trump’s lawyers attempt to sell them on Trump’s clear demands being merely aspirational.
Team Trump might have better luck selling dead parrots. But with a client like Donald Trump, putting on a defense as blustery and clownish as their client may be the best they’ve got as well as what Trump will demand — that they warp reality to suit him. They don’t dare put the Man of 30,000 Lies on the witness stand.
What was it Indiana Jones said? “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”
Republicans argue that Joe Biden at 80 is too old for the presidency. Their 2024 frontrunner and very stable genius is just three years younger and proving that the miles have not treated him well. Trump never fully matured. And these days he’s looking more and more like a toddler.
