After a weekend break from the endless tweeting, President Trump woke up on Monday morning to watch Fox & Friends and rant over every story. In perfect lockstep, his personal state media channel fed him lines and he jumped on every one.
Trump and his team seemed to have learned a lesson from the Alabama Roy Moore debacle: supporting a blatant racist with a criminal past is not the smartest way to win an election. In West Virginia’s Tuesday primary, the Republican candidate gaining steam in the polls is former coal magnate Don Blankenship, who was convicted and sentenced for an explosion at one of his mines in 2010 that killed 29 people. Of course, with all his wealth, Blankenship spent only one year in jail for those 29 deaths, and now he’s running in West Virginia’s Senate primary and blasting Mitch McConnell’s “China family” (McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, is Taiwanese) in campaign ads.
After Trump’s win, it’s not really a surprise that GOP voters would feel comfortable casting a vote for this guy.
Trump and his spokespeople have also been on a campaign to install another criminal, Gina Haspel, as CIA director. Haspel reportedly wanted to withdraw her name from the nomination to avoid the grilling she’d receive during her confirmation hearing because a woman who supported and helped cover up torture is too afraid to undergo tough questioning.
Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has also been on a media campaign to support Haspel, calling Democrats “hypocrites” for standing against a war criminal’s nomination to a top law enforcement agency because that nominee is female. Sanders insisted that this was the very definition of anti-feminism in yet another display of how confused Republicans are about what feminism actually means.
Trump ended his Monday morning rant with more misleading claims about the investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian government operatives. Insisting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team consists of “13 Angry Democrats,” Trump continued to push claims of “conflicts of interest” among the team.
While it can be noted again that Mueller’s team consists of 17 investigators, Mueller himself is a registered Republican who was appointed by a Republican president, a federal investigator’s personal politics cannot be considered when choosing them for a case, and that Hillary Clinton’s investigative committees were Republican-led because that’s what seemed fair to the GOP at the time and she was still cleared of wrongdoing. However, there’s a more important point to consider.
Trump once wanted to insist that Mueller himself had conflicts of interest, one of which was that, seven years ago, Mueller resigned his golf membership at a Trump-owned club over golf fees. Trump thought his voters would believe that a former FBI director lay in wait for seven years to get his revenge over golf fees.
In fact, his voters probably would believe that.
Twitter was quick to respond to Trump’s tweets; see some of their best comments below:
Featured image via Getty/Pool
