The President Held an Extremely Normal HeliPresser After Robert Mueller's Testimony
The world's most powerful man jabbed his finger in people's faces, screaming, "You're Fake News!" He also said Wikileaks was a "hoax."
But there was still time for another bit of speechifying, this time featuring a bold call to arms: "If you listen to the Internet..."
This is something your grandpa would say at dinner and you'd share a smirk with somebody else at the table and move on. Except he's the president. "It was a fake set of facts that the Democrats used, and others, to try and do really an illegal overthrow," he barked.
One of the more inevitable bits of fallout from Robert Mueller's testimony was that Donald Trump would declare victory while betraying his real fear that he may still face repercussions for his behavior. After all, the ex-special counsel confirmed in his testimony that:
1) Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, because they believed a Trump presidency would benefit Russia.
2) The Trump campaign was aware of and welcomed that attack, and did not at any point report it to law enforcement. Campaign officials had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and also did not report that. In fact, he and his people lied relentlessly about it to cover it up.
3) Trump repeatedly obstructed the subsequent investigation into a hostile foreign power's attack on American democracy and whether his associates played a role.
4) The president could not be charged with a crime while in office—because of a Justice Department guideline that is the only reasonable explanation for why he wasn't indicted for obstruction of justice—but could still be charged after he leaves.
Before we begin, it's worth remarking on the White House press corp's continued participation in these obvious charades. The president is not holding a press conference in front of a helicopter with spinning rotors that cause an infernal din because he wants to make himself available and accountable to the public.
He is doing it so viewers can't hear reporters' questions, reporters can't ask follow-ups when he lies blatantly, and all that viewers really get is his unfiltered bullshit shouted at them while he bludgeons faceless journalists.
It's a way to bypass the free press as a mechanism of democratic accountability—the same way he uses Twitter—while maintaining a facade of accountability.)
OK, here we go.
Here's the President of the United States, stabbing his finger towards a reporter as he yells, "You're Fake News," insisting that Robert Mueller made a "correction" to the statement that the president could be charged with a crime after he leaves office. Mueller did not correct this. He corrected his definitive statement that the only reason Trump was not indicted was the Justice Department regulation against indicting a sitting president.
(Again, this is almost certainly the reason, though: Mueller found insufficient evidence to charge Trump with conspiracy, and said so in the report. He did not say there was insufficient evidence of obstruction, though, and, in fact, laid out voluminous evidence of it.
At the hearing, he confirmed various incidents met all three legal criteria to constitute obstruction. Trump wasn't charged because he's the president. Any other American would have been indicted long ago.)
Anyway, the reporter was exactly right. There's some debate as to whether Mueller was referring to this case specifically or to sitting presidents in general, but he did not retract the statement.
Forget all that, though—it's the president's yelling time! It's incredible that we have accepted this state of affairs, where the world's most powerful man stomps around a gaggle of reporters, yelling at them that they're Fake, repeating his (usually false) claims in escalating tantrumized tones like a 9-year-old. There was another dose of it when Wikileaks came up.
Wikileaks, an organization Trump praised countless times and whose website he frequently directed people towards during the 2016 election, is now a "hoax"? Is he saying it doesn't exist, or is he struggling to articulate, with his extremely limited vocabulary and nightmarish syntax, that it was not involved in the Russian interference?
The latter is also untrue, but would have at least a modicum of the sophistication we ought to demand from authoritarian leaders who lie to our faces. And then, of course, he screamed at another reporter that they were also Fake News. This is considered a normal tactic for the President of the United States to employ.
But there was still time for another bit of speechifying, this time featuring a bold call to arms: "If you listen to the Internet..."
This is something your grandpa would say at dinner and you'd share a smirk with somebody else at the table and move on. Except he's the president. "It was a fake set of facts that the Democrats used, and others, to try and do really an illegal overthrow," he barked.
This was another clumsy attempt to allege there was an attempted coup against him, but we no longer even expect the president to speak English at an eighth-grade level. The Deep State, you see, tried to do an overthrow. It's gotten to the point where he's repeated the same lies and distortions and intergalactic delusions blasted from the Fox News infotainment vortex so often that we can use heuristics to decipher what he's saying, even if his language is not, in itself, particularly comprehensible.
This is all another reminder that House Democrats really should not need the numerous instances of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller Report—or, for that matter, the financial records Nancy Pelosi cited in a press conference yesterday evening—to begin impeachment proceedings.
It feels like reasonable enough criteria that the president is fucking nuts. It's easy to forget that a few days ago, he caused an international incident when he off-handedly floated perpetrating a genocide in Afghanistan. He's also been accused by numerous women of sexual assault and misconduct.
He's also a blatant racist who has embraced political violence. He's also attacking the institutions of democracy, like the separation of powers and an independent system of justice and the free press, which can provide a check on his power. And yeah, he obstructed justice. Might be time to do something.
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