From the Washington Post this morning:
In his first TV appearance since a court-authorized search of his Florida home last month, Donald Trump reasserted Wednesday that any documents taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago were declassified while he was in office, adding that a president can carry that out “even by thinking about it.”
This is the shortest clip I could find. Just ignore the guy in the corner:
I was reminded of Richard Nixon’s assertion: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Democracy is such a fragile thing. And bit by bit, ours is slipping away. Nixon with his tapes and lies. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their war crimes. And now Trump. Good lord, two impeachments but no conviction!? He’s still free to run again for president. That’s enough to keep you awake at night. But claiming he can declassify top secret government documents just by thinking about it? The man is so ignorant, so delusional, so far gone around the bend, it’s a miracle the nation survived his presidency.
It remains to be seen if we can survive his continued freedom.
Lesson: Big lies win more.
That’s a scary thought! But I can’t say it’s not true.
Unhappily, there will always be half a country that wants only to disagree with the other half, regardless of sense, logic, safety, etc., etc. Such is the composition of tRump followers.
That’s precisely why he has been and will continue to be so dangerous!
Wait… maybe Obama declassified Hilary’s emails that the right is so amped up about, just by thinking about them.
OMG, you think!?
I am so tired these two old guys who seem determined to ramp their vendetta against each other using their wealth and assorted power- who cares about the impact on the country (which is not in very good shaper right now. and more divided than ever)
Talk about emotionally charged speech and inciting the crazies….
https://www.wctrib.com/news/north-dakota/police-driver-admitted-to-intentionally-killing-teen-at-north-dakota-street-dance-after-political-dispute
Attacks on Supreme Court justices. Bullying people in their homes and even restaurants
The inflammatory language and name calling needs to stop. There are real borderline nuts out there who easily influenced.
Emails, Chinese entanglements with family/business, real estate issues, Russia Russia Russia, being “too smart or too special” to follow rules, repeating stories that everyone knows aren’t true and never happened, and snarky juvenile remarks on Twitter.
I don’t want either man to run of any elected office ever…but then again I said that before the last election.
I wouldn’t give them a break by calling them only “borderline” nuts. Many are the real thing, I think. I do wish a younger Democrat would get serious about running for president, but it’s probably already too late to fire up a campaign. Besides, who wants to split the Dem vote if Biden is determined to run? On the other hand, if he were to step aside and deliberately endorse a specific, announced Dem candidate, maybe it would work. As for the GOP, offhand I can’t think of any sane ones; only the nuts are in the headlines these days. Jon Huntsman is the last one I remember liking. All the moderate Republicans seem to have disappeared.
Correction: I’ve been very impressed with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Cheney has recently declared she “won’t be a Republican” if Trump is the GOP nominee in 2024. More Republicans should follow her example. Sadly, she’s been ostraicezed by the GOP because of her work on the Jan. 6th Committee.
We are always hearing, “No one is above the law.” Clearly, Trump and his devoted base believe that he is above the law, not only when he was president but even now, because, you know, he didn’t lose in 2020. In effect, he thinks he is royalty.
Exactly. He thought being president made him king. Or dictator. Or god. It was bad enough that he got away with stuff when he was president. But that privilege is gone now. I don’t think former presidents should get any special privileges at all. They return to being private citizens and should be treated as such. Unfortunately, it will probably take several decades to undo the damage he did — if it can be undone. “The evil men do lives after them.”
Would they just all go away, please: Hilary (“I won actually” and so what if Bill hid Pres. tapes in his sock drawer and presidential record boxes in an old car trunk in a closed used car lot in Little Rock until they came for them?”), Al Gore ( “I invented the internet and I also actually won…and I have to be able to use my personal jet while everyone else”), and Obama (“So what if I had presidential records stashed in a closed furniture store across from McDonald’s for a while” Romney, Bushlleague JR – yes you are so right – please al of you go away and try, just make an attempt and try to be ordinary citizens! Where are the sane, up and coming electables? We are lurching between crisis to crisis – so much time spent campaigning for the next election by elected officials while they are in office, little actually beneficial getting done.
It’s always seemed to me that the most sane electables are too smart to get into politics in the first place. I like Pete Buttigieg but he’s still too green. And I like Colorado’s two senators, but can’t see either one as president. Don’t know much about anyone else.
Right now it looks like our only hope is pushing “closer to will of the people” and getting issues to be voted on during state and local elections…where you can actually get hold of your elected officials and have more of an impact…those that are effected, the general public, can actually have a say in directions instead of career politicians who rarely had another job and for sure have forgotten what we the people want and expect them to do?
But you are right, as ugly as it is, why would any decent person want to run for Washington office? (Campaigns are getting pretty ugly – and featuring quotes without context as well as tossing out slanted untruths – both side in the mud and slime here. Sigh. Click to all of them)
With the notable exception of Lauren Boebert, most local voting activity in Colorado goes pretty well. Our current two senators (Bennet and Hickenlooper) won local support before moving up the chain to Washington, and the legislature voted in laws to protect abortion both for Coloradans and for those women coming here from out of state. But the campaigning everywhere, via every conduit, is enough to drive one crazy.
Unfortunately I’m in Colorado’s newly created 8th Congressional district and have no idea who will end up as my representative after the dust settles.
I’m trying to be optimistic. Requiring each state’s representatives and governor to openly advocate forcing full term pregnancies may be enough to encourage voters to oust those loons. But, then again the same voters voted for the most loony of all loons, Donald J. Trump who believes that telepathy is a presidential power. Even though classification of government documents has no bearing on their illegal theft and storage. Moron.
Well, damn. I just wrote a seething little rant about morons and the self-righteous idiots who continue to support them, and I managed to delete it rather than post it. The last line was something like: Should I be booking my flight to Canada now?
/sigh