You’d think that the president of the United States of America would be on the country’s side in the face of a hostile foreign power seeking to meddle in our elections, but lo and behold, such has proven to not be the case. Time and time again Trump has tried to question the validity and seriousness of the Russia scandal, thus making us more vulnerable to more and possibly more intense interference in the future since he’s doing nothing to try and stop it.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller stands as a fitting counter to the president’s inaction, having recently handed down a selection of indictments against Russian nationals for having meddled in the 2016 elections.
These indictments come after Mueller brought charges against several former members of the president’s own team, including most recently Michael Flynn.
Trump’s response to the latest round of indictments from Mueller has been unsurprisingly, but still disturbingly, belligerent, with him having posted a series of tweets over the weekend claiming that, even in the face of the indictments, the Russia scandal remains much less of a real scandal than the “fake news” made it out to be.
California Democratic U.S. Representative Ted Lieu, who has often been vocal in his criticism of the president, has an idea for why this might be the case — the president’s tweets are being written by Russians and not himself.
Lieu’s suggestion to that effect, of course, isn’t entirely serious, but in the face of the ridiculous tweets being spewed by the president — tweets that aren’t meaningless, but are rather public statements from the president of the United States — it’s as good an explanation as anything else.
Lieu wrote on the social media platform early Sunday:
‘In last 12 hours, there have been a series of desperate tweets from the account of
@realDonaldTrump. I can’t tell if@POTUS is writing them, or if it’s someone from Russia’s Internet Research Agency. Also, when is Trump going to implement the bipartisan congressional sanctions?’
As Lieu mentions, the Trump administration has declined to actually implement sanctions against Russia passed some time ago by Congress, attracting widespread criticism in the process.
Lieu’s tweet was in response to a particularly incendiary tweet from the president, reading as follows:
‘If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!’
There’s something that the president ignores in the message to which Lieu was replying.
If he himself were to stop his endless lashing out over the Russia scandal, in which he’s sought to undercut the nation’s justice system time and time again, then we could present a unified face to confront the threat of Russian election meddling and move forward.
Trump, however, doesn’t like that idea; what he doesn’t note in his message is that the discord he’s speaking about is sparked in large part by his own actions.
Lieu eventually added another statement in line with his one cited above, writing:
‘In the future when they teach prosecutors how to recognize CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT, they will reprint copies of the tweets from
@realDonaldTrump this#SundayMorning.’
Check out Twitter’s response to Lieu below.
Featured Image via Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
