Trump’s deeply worrisome New York Times interview reveals a lawless president

...and Trumpists are just as lawless for supporting it.

President Trump’s extended, rambling new interview with the New York Times provides perhaps the clearest picture yet of his conviction that he is above the law — a conviction, crucially, that appears to be deeply felt on an instinctual level — and of his total lack of any clear conception of the basic obligations to the public he assumed upon taking office.

There are numerous worrisome moments in this interview, from his incoherence on the health care debate (“preexisting conditions are a tough deal”) to his odd asides about history (Napoleon “didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death”). But I wanted to highlight the sum total of the picture that results from three things Trump said:

Trump flatly declared that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions had told him in advance that he would recuse himself from the Russia probe, “I would have picked somebody else.” Just as bad, Trump also said that Sessions’ recusal was “very unfair to the president,” i.e., unfair to him.

Trump said clearly that if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is examining his family’s finances, he would view that as an abuse of his role. While Trump declined to say if he would try to get Mueller removed, he said he would view it as a “violation.”

In a least two exchanges, Trump was asked directly about the fact that Donald Trump Jr.’s email chain showed that the information offered to his campaign in advance of the now-notorious meeting came from the Russian government. In one of them, he strongly suggested that being open to such information was no biggie. In the other, he dismissed the offer itself as “standard political stuff.”
[link to www.washingtonpost.com (secure)]

Last Edited by plus on 07/20/2017 12:05 PM