President Donald Trump is by far the most dishonest president we’ve ever witnessed, but from time to time he’s also the most honest in American history. When he’s not telling whoppers, Trump has an uncanny knack for blurting out the most embarrassing truths.
After he and his administration told a series of obvious lies about firing former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey because he’d been so unfair to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump came right out and told the National Broadcasting Company’s Lester Holt that he did it because of “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia.” Trump also claimed that neither he nor anyone on his campaign had any contact with any Russians during his presidential campaign, but that’s been exposed as a lie by his namesake son’s sworn testimony to Congress and the guilty pleas of his former campaign manager and national security advisor, and on Wednesday he blurted out to the American Broadcasting Company’s George Stephanopoulos he’d happily accept a foreign government’s assistance in his next campaign.
“If somebody called from a foreign government, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it,” Trump said. Norway is highly unlikely to meddle in an American presidential election, especially on Trump’s behalf, as Trump surely knows, but the president made clear that he’d have no problem accepting an assist from a more adversarial power that had illegally obtained information about a rival. “It’s not an interference, they have information — I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI, if I thought there was something wrong.” Trump defended Donald Trump Jr.’s decision to take a meeting with Russian operatives promising purloined dirt on Clinton, which his admitted and self-published e-mail chains show him saying “I love it,” and gave no indiction about what level of foreign meddling by Norway or Russia would rise to the level that he’d let the Federal Bureau of Investigation know about it.
Our guess is that Trump would draw the line at any foreign meddling on behalf of his domestic political opponents.
Trump and his talk radio apologists are accusing Clinton of treason for partially funding the investigation of former British intelligence agency operative Christopher Steele that alleged Russian interference in the last election and the Russians having some salacious video of Trump during a stay in a Moscow hotel during a Miss Universe pageant, but we’re not buying any of it. As horrid a harridan as Clinton undeniably is, she never used any of Steele’s allegations during the campaign, and although the more salacious parts of his report are still yet unverified the main gist that Russia was working to elect Trump has been corroborated by all of the Trump appointees to America’s intelligence agencies. Given Trump’s much bragged about sexual history, we can’t even dismiss the more salacious claims in the Steele dossier.
The Trump fans who wouldn’t abandon him even he if shot a man on New York City’s Fifth Avenue won’t mind, of course. If it took the cooperation of the anti-American Russian dictatorship for Trump to beat that horrid harridan Clinton then so be it, they’ll figure, and they won’t mind if he or any other Republican nominee needed their help to beat whatever fruitcake the Democrats might nominate next they also won’t mind that. Norway or some other western civilization ally might interfere on some Democrat’s behalf in the next presidential election, but that’s highly unlikely, and will be another matter.
For now we have Trump’s lies about how the Russians meddled on his behalf in the last presidential election, and his stubborn refusal to do anything about it, and his somewhat admirably upfront admission on national television that he’d welcome their help the next time around. None of the two dozen or so damned Democrats running for president in the upcoming election are at all appealing to our old-fashioned Republican sensibilities, but neither is Trump, so we’ll see how it all turns out.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 