February 6, 2020: Trump Vents after Impeachment Trial Ends in Acquittal

 

2/6/20: Having been acquitted by the Senate, President Trump attends the National Prayer Breakfast. This is normally a polite affair where politicians from across the spectrum gather and break bread in harmony.

 

_____________________ 

“You believe in Jesus! Follow his teachings.” 

Arthur Brooks, former head of the American Enterprise Institute

_____________________

  

The keynote speaker is Arthur Brooks, former head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He appeals to his audience, including faith leaders, to see the “polarization and contempt” in American society “as a mission field, as an opportunity to model Jesus’ message to love one’s enemies.” 

“The problem is: The devil is in the details,” he continues. “How do you do it in a country and world roiled by hatreds we can’t seem to bridge? Contempt kills. Ask God to give you the strength to do this hard thing. To go against your human nature. To follow Jesus’ teaching. You believe in Jesus! Follow his teachings.” 

The president strides to the podium next. Eyewitnesses notice that Trump kept his hand down when Brooks asked attendees to raise their hands if they loved anyone who disagreed with them politically. Trump says, in his opening remarks, that he isn’t sure he agrees with Brooks. “Jesus,” he probably wants to say, “was weak. Low I.Q. Jesus. I like Saviors who don’t get crucified.” 

Fortunately, he refrains.

 

Otherwise, he’s only there for the pancakes and a chance to vent. “When they impeach you for nothing, then it’s not easy to like them,” he says of his opponents. “It’s not easy, folks.” No one thought he could win in 2016, he explains, “except for the people in this room believed we were going to win. God was with them. God is with the people in this room.” 

Well: The people who support him in the room, he means. God is not with Nancy Pelosi and a few others, who are in attendance. 

True hate fuels the President of the United States. 

This blogger knows, from comments his conservative friends have made, that they are upset that Speaker Pelosi ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union Address the previous night. 

Such a breach of decorum, they said!

 

* 

HERE WE HAVE TRUMP, 36 hours later. He doesn’t mention Sen. Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, or Pelosi, a staunch Catholic, by name. But he unleashes the vitriol. “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” he sneers. 

“Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so. So many people have been hurt, and we can’t let that go on.” 

Trump knows his campaign in 2016 had multiple contacts with Russians, offering him help to win. He said last summer that he didn’t see why you wouldn’t take help from a foreign country in 2020, if they had dirt on a political rival. He said he’d take it, hypothetically, from Norway. 

It seems, from the supine response of Republicans in the Senate, that they’d have been okay if he said he’d take it from North Korea. 

Then Trump asked Ukraine for a favor – a favor that numerous men and women working in his White House and for his diplomatic corps thought was wrong. But now he’s saying it’s not his fault. At the Prayer Breakfast, he rambles on for 20 minutes, spending a good chunk of that time attacking those who impeached him. The impeachment process, he says, was led by some “very dishonest and corrupt people.” 

“They have done everything possible to destroy us and, by so doing, very badly hurt our nation,” he fumes. 

* 

“Some very evil and sick people.” 

BREAKFAST WAS BAD. An afternoon gathering in the White House is worse. With top GOP leaders and members of his defense team gathered to listen, Trump speaks with the tone and phrasing of a dictator at the founding of a banana republic. 

He waves copies of several newspapers, with headlines like, ACQUITTED or TRUMP ACQUITTED. 

“Maybe we’ll frame it,” he says of one copy, before handing it to his wife. 

Trump lashes out, as only a man driven by hate can. He labels congressional Democrats “scum.” Those who investigated him (who, by the way, were not accused by any witnesses of having put U.S. national security at risk, as several testified under oath that Trump had), those investigators are “sleaze bags,” “vicious and mean.” Their actions were a “disgrace.” A better man, a man of even minimal character, and not a man fueled by venom and warped by a narcissistic craving for adulation, might have struck a conciliatory tone. Such a man might have promised to learn from his mistakes. 

Not Trump.

 

“I want to apologize to my family,” he says, “for having them have to go through a phony, rotten deal by some very evil and sick people. I just want to thank my family for sticking through it. This was not part of the deal.” 

It was “part of the deal” only because he himself held up aid to Ukraine. Because he sent a shady crew, led by Rudy Giuliani, to dig up dirt, and a good chunk of that crew has since been indicted. 

The people who tried to hold him to account? 

Sick. 

Evil. 

His hate is strong and the president continues to spew. “These people are vicious,” he says. “Adam Schiff is a vicious, horrible person. Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person.” (Neither has ever been accused of asking for foreign help in an election.) 

Trump did ask.

 

For some reason, he brings up former F.B.I. Director James Comey. He calls him a “sleazebag.” He starts talking about the Russia investigation. “Had I not fired James Comey, who was a disaster by the way, it’s possible I wouldn’t even be standing here right now,” Trump continues. “We caught him in the act. Dirty cops. Bad people.” He says it’s “almost like” the Democrats “want to destroy our country.” 

They don’t. 

“We’ve been going through this now over three years. It was evil. It was corrupt,” the president concludes. “It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars. And this should never ever happen to another president….We went through hell, unfairly, did nothing wrong, did nothing wrong.” 

Finally, he says, “It was all bullshit.”

 

* 

“Maybe people should pay for that.” 

SOMEONE asks Press Enabler Stephanie Grisham later what she thinks about the way her boss has been treated. 

“Maybe people should pay for that,” she replies, just what every press secretary in every banana republic in history would have said.  

Speaker Nancy Pelosi responds to the president’s diatribe and Grisham’s comment that afternoon. See if you notice anything different about her tone. 

“They say there’s going to be payback for us – for honoring the Constitution,” Pelosi says. “He’s impeached forever, no matter what he says or what headlines he wants to carry around.” 

Pelosi doesn’t talk about evil people, sick people, vicious people, sleazebags, or scum. She makes no threats.