Trump has many limitations. He’s not good at public speaking. He’s not good at rational or coherent thought. He’s certainly not good at critical thinking skills. What his response to the latest Mueller indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering in the 2016 presidential elections shows is that he’s also not at all good at reading comprehension. Or at least, he’s hoping his supporters aren’t.
Trump is hoping that his supporters, and anyone else he can convince, will believe that the day he announced his candidacy and called Mexican immigrants racists and drug dealers that it was a spontaneous decision that required no planning and no strategy whatsoever. Trump, he’d like everyone to believe, was just sitting in his gold-plated apartment at Trump Tower, rode downstairs on an escalator where swarms of media were standing around hoping to catch a glimpse of him, and just decided he’d announce that he would run for the presidency. In Trump’s mind, these sorts of things happen when you’re Donald Trump.
The truth, however, is this. At a meeting with GOP officials and political strategists, Trump had already decided not only that he would run, but how he would win the presidency:
‘I’m going to walk away with it and win it outright. I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.’
That meeting happened in December of 2013, well before Russian operatives decided to interfere in the 2016 elections that Trump announced publicly he would enter in 2015. Trump knew he was going to run. He had thrown his hat in the ring before, both in 2000 and in 2012. Russia didn’t know “after I did,” they began supporting him fairly immediately following the decision had been made and strategy planning had begun for Trump’s serious presidential campaign.
Trump is in no way vindicated by the latest round of indictments. Rod Rosenstein very specifically said that this indictment did not include information about collusion with any American. He never said that collusion didn’t happen.
Twitter was quick to react to Trump’s latest Twitter rant. See some of their best comments below.
Featured image via Getty/The Washington Post
