What is he, three?
Philip Bump did a nice rundown of the “tortured” right wing rationalizations over Trumps criminal behavior. (gift link)If you don’t watch Fox you will be surprised at just how stupid it really is:
If last week is any guide, somewhere north of 2 million people tuned in to Jesse Watters’s prime-time show on Fox News on Monday night to hear him moan that Donald Trump was being tortured. That the treatment the former president was experiencing during his criminal trial in New York was equivalent to — or perhaps worse than? — that experienced by at Guantánamo Bay.
“Donald Trump, been on the move his whole life,” Watters told viewers after describing the purported leniency Democrats had offered those detainees. “Golf. Rallies. Movement. Action. Sunlight. Fresh air. Freedom. This isn’t lawfare. It’s torture.”
He played a clip of a podcast hosted by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen — expected to testify against Trump in the Manhattan hush money case — and whimpered about how unfair it was.
“The star witness, who went to prison for lying,” Watters said, “is torturing Trump and bossing the judge around.”
Both of those things are, in fact, happening in equal measure when Cohen says things on his podcast. Which is to say that neither is happening at all, for obvious reasons.
But Watters was simply building to his central point: that the Manhattan case was simply a function of a personal vendetta against Trump and not, per his own interpretation of state statutes, a violation of the law.
“There’s nothing wrong with the nondisclosure agreement,” Watters told the camera. Then: “Can you believe the Democrats still can’t get over the 2016 election? It’s now a crime to beat Hillary.”
That was the text on the lower third of the screen, too: “IT’S NOW A CRIME TO BEAT HILLARY.”
There’s more, much more, and you should click over to read the whole thing.
A few hours before Watters’s show, “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt dug a little deeper on this idea.
“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” she fretted. “What if they’ve done something like this in the past?” She offered a slippery-slope example: If someone “paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference.”
The short answer is no, of course: If you’re not actively a candidate, you’re not subject to campaign finance rules. But also, is Earhardt — who positions her Christian faith as a central element of her identity — really worried that guys who tried to cover up allegations of extramarital affairs with porn stars might be dissuaded from running for president? That’s the concern? That this unacceptably narrows the field of possible leaders of the country?
Trump has long benefited from his allies excusing or downplaying his behavior and comments. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of his wondering during a news conference whether we couldn’t inject light or disinfectant into people to combat the coronavirus — comments incorrectly distilled as his saying that people should inject bleach but fairly dismissed as unworkable and bizarre. Watters, like many others, has waved those comments away not by defending them but by criticizing the exaggerated criticisms of it.
For nearly nine years now, Trump has been the driving figure on the political right. Over that time, he and his allies have developed robust tactics for dismissing or sidelining criticism. We see them now deployed in a much more challenging context: against a criminal justice system that is predicated on distilling truth from fiction.
The cult will buy anything, obviously. But he’s in court now, with all kinds of rules (which he whines daily are unfaaaaaair!) that apply to all of us. The right wing caterwauling isn’t going to help him there.