Trump responds to a week of damning impeachment progress with flailing defensive tweet
What a difference a week makes.
Over last weekend’s extended Thanksgiving holiday, we were mercifully spared the usual avalanche of presidential tweets as Donald Trump’s output dwindled to a trickle of retweets and the occasional original composition, typically a rehashed variation of his “witch hunt” series.
This weekend, however, Trump is back up to speed, furiously retweeting any vaguely positive post by one of his slavish army of Republican lapdogs and conservative media outlets. To understand the newfound resurgence in propagandistic posts, one need only look back at the developments in the Democrats’ efforts to move the president’s impeachment forward.
Most of the over 23 retweets that Trump posted came from a motley collection of reliable right-wing boot-lickers including Congressmen Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, GOP Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his own lawyer Jay Sekulow, and conservative media outlets like Newsmax, One America News, and Judicial Watch and nearly all were either attacks on the impeachment inquiry or thinly disguised campaign ads touting the president’s popularity or the nation’s economic performance which has continued the upward trend begun in the Obama administration despite Trump’s harmful tariff policies.
After the flurry of posts from his supporters, Trump demonstrated his continued obsession with his impeachment woes with yet another plea to the public to “Read the Transcripts!” in a tweet that seemed like it was plucked from the middle of a conversation already in progress.
Read the Transcripts! Also, see where I say “us” (our Country) as opposed to “me” (meaning me) and where I then say that the Attorney General (of the United States) will call you. People still remember Schiff’s made up and fraudulent version of my conversation. Witch Hunt!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2019
Unlike the posts that are transparently composed by his social media staff on his behalf, this one has all the hallmarks of a self-penned tweet: self-absorption, blatant stupidity, random capitalization, and a lack of an iota of truth.
The transcripts he refers to are apparently those of his “perfect” phone call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky — since it’s doubtful that Trump would want the public to read the transcripts of the transparently incriminating testimony from the fact witnesses in the impeachment hearings.
That Trump finds it necessary to define his pronouns like a third-grader imitating the format of a legal contract shows how desperate he is to spin his incriminating conversation away from the plainly apparent quid pro quo that it demonstrates and that has been confirmed in the impeachment inquiry by multiple witnesses with direct knowledge of the administration’s illegal schemes.
Despite Trump’s obvious mental decline, he is still cognizant enough to remember the old Nazi propaganda adage: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Here the big lie is Trump’s innocence. Hence, the constant repetition of the “Witch Hunt” claim and the other prevarications that Trump hammers relentlessly.
Unfortunately, the nation now finds itself divided between those of us who don’t believe a single word that Donald Trump utters and those that — either through blind devotion, naked self-interest, or simple lack of desire to pay attention — accept the president’s words as a sacred screed.
What is so screamingly obvious to half the population — Trump’s criminality and the need to remove him from office — is too effectively countered for the other half by his tweeted onslaught of falsehoods.
While the impeachment process in the House of Representatives is too far along to not continue to a Senate trial unless the Democrats raise their game in countering Trump’s lies, his removal from office is far from guaranteed, no matter how convincing the evidence may be.
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