Trump’s “I was very busy” interview with Fox News
“Good morning, everyone, especially those of you who didn’t admit to committing more federal crimes on television last night,” snarks the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson.
“I don’t like watching the former guy EVER – least of all on Juneteenth – but he just confessed to the crime of stealing classified documents,” tweeted Christine Pelosi Monday night.
ICYMI, Wilson and Pelosi mean this Donald Trump interview with Bret Baier of Fox News.
“Because I had boxes, I wanted to go through the boxes and get all of my personal things out. I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet. And I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen,” Trump insisted about why he failed to return all the national defense documents he removed from the White House.
But he was not too busy to order his attorneys to affirm in a sworn statement that he had complied fully with the subpoena.
Also, he’s not a very good listener, is he?
The sniffing is back. “His tell… whenever he’s spewing an egregious lie,” observed GottaLaff on Mastodon.
Trump insists he has no other government documents. Yet there are still the missing documents special prosecutor Jack Smith’s federal indictment suggests he moved to his Bedminster, N.J. resort. Questions about them remain unanswered, perhaps so as not to distract from his prosecution in Florida.
Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic that Trump seems not to have any sense of morality. The sniffing — his “tell” — suggests he still knows when he’s been caught in a lie.
But Trump’s enablers, his acolytes and believers? Most of them are not so emotionally and morally stunted as Trump. They are, however, nearly as transactional:
Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.
But what’s true of Trump isn’t true of the majority of his enablers. They see the colors that Trump cannot. They still know right from wrong. But for a combination of reasons, they have consistently overridden their conscience, in some cases unwittingly and in some cases cynically. They have talked themselves into believing, or half-believing, that Trump is America’s martyr and America’s savior.
Trump’s behavior obviously speaks to his own character. But Trump’s behavior has also proved to be a test of the character of others—Republican politicians and voters, the GOP establishment and the evangelical movement. It’s proved to be a test of character for those who claim to be “constitutional conservatives” and “family values” advocates, for ethicists and public intellectuals, for right-wing commentators and party strategists.
With very few exceptions, and to varying degrees, they have failed it. They have turned against—or at the very least, at a crucial hour, they have failed to defend—ideals and institutions they once claimed to cherish. Donald Trump could not have so deeply wounded our republic without his enablers. It took a team effort.
“Being president doesn’t change who you are—it reveals who you are,” Michelle Obama once said of her husband. “For Barack, success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives,” she said.
Most Americans did not need Trump occupying the Oval Office to know who and what he is. Nor did we need the awful difference he’s made in this country.
Trump’s ascension in and takeover of the Republican Party pulled back the curtain to reveal the Dorian Gray portraits of American conservatism and the evangelical movement. Both refuse to gaze upon what they have become.