All of a sudden, everyone’s so shocked and surprised that Donald Trump said something he wasn’t supposed to say.
I’m referring, of course, to the interview Trump did with Brett Baier on Monday night, when he admitted to withholding documents even after receiving a DOJ subpoena covering stuff that should have been turned over to the DOJ or the National Archives when Trump moved out of the White House the day that Joe was sworn in.
This is the reason that Trump is facing an August federal trial on 37 felony charges and now he admits to having done exactly what the indictment says he had done. And Trump claims that Joe is too demented to hold onto the Oval Office after 2024?
Why is anyone shocked or surprised when Trump opens his mouth and out comes a big, verbal turd? Here’s a guy who, according to the Washington Post, made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements during a four-year term. And note, incidentally, that the WaPo only began counting lies and misstatements made by Trump after he was sworn in.
What about everything he said in the seventeen months between when he announced he was running in front of a paid-for-appearing crowd of ‘supporters’ in June 2015 and when he took the oath and then delivered a loony speech filled with half-truths and false promises on January 20, 2017?
To me, what is interesting about Trump’s interview was not the fact that he said something totally incriminating about his own behavior, statements which everyone seems to think will guarantee he winds up in jail. It is the fact that Trump himself appears to have decided that over the course of the interview he did a really good job.
As the story about the interview was reported in Rolling Stone, Trump felt that the interview made hm look ‘tough’ and created the kind of TV imaging which Trump always tries to create.
For all the Fake News pundits who regularly tell us what we need to know and understand about Trump, I have yet to read any of these experts who have told me what I know to be the real reason that Trump ran for President in 2016.
He didn’t run because he wanted to ‘serve.’ He didn’t run because he believed that a career in public service was a good or honorable thing. He didn’t run to make America ‘great again,’ no matter what he said.
Trump ran for President because once he held a copyright on using the term ‘MAGA’ for all those flags, t-shirts, and hats, he had a new way to make a buck. Trump may have started off as a guy who built some condos in New York. But what he really always built was a brand. And the brand was named ‘Trump.’ Tough guy Trump.
Know what happens when you build a brand? It’s all about what you say about the brand, whether there’s any reality behind what you say or not. That’s course in Business School called Advertising 101.
Trump has been indicted for doing what he always does, which is to lie whenever a lie will sell better than the truth. In fact, even with all those lies that Trump told and keeps telling about the cartons of classified documents sitting in a toilet at Mar-a-Lago, has anything really all that bad happened just because he didn’t give back to the Justice Department what he was supposed to give back?
I can’t think of a single lie which Trump ever told which comes remotely close to the damage caused by a lie that Lyndon Johnson told in 1964 when he claimed that a naval ship was attacked by the North Vietnam navy in the Tonkin Gulf.
That lie resulted in more than 60,000 Americans getting killed and several million peasants getting immolated in Cambodia and Viet Nam. The names of two of my classmates are inscribed on that goddamn wall in Washington, D.C.
Was LBJ indicted for telling that lie? Nope.
So why make such a big deal out of Trump lying about some papers stashed in the basement of his house?
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