President Donald Trump unloaded a baffling cargo of words Wednesday after George Stephanopoulos asked him whether his son Donald Jr. should have contacted the FBI in June 2016 when a gang of Russians offered him “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Not necessarily, Trump implied in his first answer. Asked about his own FBI director’s assertion that of course a campaign should contact the FBI, Trump went full-tilt adamant.
“The FBI director is wrong,” Trump said.
Politico
Trump’s responses weren’t a surprise to anyone who’s been following his presidency, but they slurped up a day’s worth of TV chyrons, keeping him the center of attention at a moment when people might be focusing on his thin claims of a deal with Mexico, or his grim 2020 poll numbers. Instead, they’re focused on a sexy but meaningless round of new pro-and-con shouting about the president himself.
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From everything we know about the Trump family, he lives in a universe in which either you’re family or you’re nobody, and in this case that “nobody” includes the entire nation he’s governing. Don Jr. is the weakest link in this whole operation—he’s the one who didn’t call the FBI, after all—and one way to see the interview was as a media smokescreen cast to shield his namesake from deeper scrutiny after his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. In a closed hearing, Junior claimed never to have lied to Congress—”despite claims by former Trump aides to the contrary,” the New York Times reported. Trump’s interview can be understood, in the simplest way, as offering cover to his son: Of course he didn’t call the FBI. Nobody would. “Life doesn’t work that way,” said the president.
Had Trump answered the hypothetical about taking campaign information from the Russians in 2020 in any other way than he did, it would have been read as a confession that he and his son did something wrong in 2016, and Trump almost never admits to having been wrong—or to anyone in his family being at fault.
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Contradicting his FBI director, defending his son for playing footsie with the Russian, and using a network TV interview to all but solicit political dirt from foreign powers was for Trump just another delightful round in the octagon. The only way for him to know for sure that he’s breathing is when he’s fighting.
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The Trump responses, while low in news value, remind us of how Trump regards the office he’s been handed, and how he regards the law itself. His own FBI director, he says, is wrong about how to proceed if a foreign power attempts to sway an election; campaign interference isn’t interference, it’s “information”; foreign meddling isn’t meddling, it’s oppo research, and everybody in Congress does it. And why call the FBI when offered stolen information? “Give me a break,” Trump told Stephanopoulos when he brought up the topic once again.
The law, in Trump’s view, is anything he says it is, and he’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
Politico
UPDATE:
I hope Robert Mueller is sleeping well tonight.
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