Town abattoir
Trump did a “Town Hall” thing last night, which is to say he did a campaign gig hosted by CNN. Why is CNN boosting Trump? I suppose because $$$.
He may have increased his legal jeopardy though.
The most heated exchange that Mr. Trump had with Ms. Collins was over the special counsel investigation into his possession of hundreds of presidential records, including more than 300 individual classified documents, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, after he left office.
And it was the area in which he walked himself into the biggest problems.
“I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified,” said Mr. Trump, who has maintained, despite contradictions from his own former officials, that he had a standing order automatically declassifying documents that left the Oval Office and went to the president’s residence.
“I had every right to do it, I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside the White House, people were taking pictures of it,” Mr. Trump said, intimating that people were somehow aware that presidential material and classified documents were in them (they were not).
In what will be of great interest to the special counsel, Jack Smith, Mr. Trump would not definitively rule out whether he showed classified material to people, something investigators have queried witnesses about, in particular in connection with a map with sensitive intelligence.
“Not really,” he hedged, adding, “I would have the right to.” At another point he declared, “I have the right to do whatever I want with them.”
All the mental prowess of an angry toddler.
He thinks he was (and still is) a monarch. He wants to be royalty. Never mind that in western democracies that have monarchs, the monarchs don’t have so much power, and they have a lot of restrictions on what they can do. And the laws are still made by the parliament, legislature, or whatever other lawmaking body they have.
Since we don’t have a monarch here, he is (or should be) bound by the laws of the country even while he is in the position of president. And the president works for us; I’m sure he doesn’t understand how to be an employee, and he only understands “you’re fired!” when he shouts it, not when we shout it at him.
That strange woman with the sword. That wasn’t Excalibur she was carrying. She was there to remind Chuck what will happen if he gets out of line. (I’m only half joking about this. The British rituals are designed with a certain amount of balance built in. But Trump sees himself as a French King. Louis the something. And when the last Louis was dealt with a lot of people got hurt. I hope the US can avoid the same fate.)