The Washington Examiner had just published a conversation in which Conway mocked and demeaned a reporter, describing herself as “a powerful woman” and threatening to have the White House expose details about the reporter’s personal life. Now Conway was fielding questions about that episode and about Trump’s confused impeachment response.
“There is no coherent message coming out of the White House on impeachment,” one of her interrogators observed.
Conway attempted to refute that observation — with 20 minutes of incoherence.
She spoke about due process. She spoke about Andrew Johnson. She said Adam Schiff is a liar. She spoke about Nixon. She spoke about unmasking the whistleblower. She spoke about Bill Clinton. She spoke about corruption in Ukraine. She spoke about the Founding Fathers. She spoke, in no particular order, about fake news, cross examinations, the Second Amendment, Robert Mueller, parking tickets, Nancy Pelosi, Twitter trolls, “cable news cranks” and journalists’ “presumptive negativity.” She challenged the character of witness William B. Taylor Jr., Trump’s acting ambassador to Ukraine. She called Democrats an “angry mob” trying to “undo” the 2016 election and “interfere with” 2020. She offered various explanations for why it wasn’t a quid pro quo to ask for a probe of Joe Biden while suspending military aid. She explained why this clear violation of election law would be neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor.
Somewhere in the middle of this ramble, Conway proposed an entirely new defense of Trump’s behavior with Ukraine: Regardless of what happened, it wasn’t a quid pro quo because Trump did not desire in his soul for it to be a quid pro quo.
“There was no quid pro quo intended,” she reasoned. “I think intent matters. And when people say ‘this is what the president intended, this is what the president believes’ … you don’t know that. So let’s take a deep breath and stop pretending we know what’s in somebody else’s heart, mind or soul.”
Genius! Trump can never be impeached because what matters is what is in his heart and his soul, and only he knows that. Likewise, he can’t be prosecuted for shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue (as the administration argued in court this week) because we cannot know where his heart and soul intended the bullet to go.
Republicans have been complaining that the White House lacks a consistent message on impeachment. The main defense — about the secrecy of the process — will become irrelevant when proceedings become public next month. “It’s hard,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham complained on Fox News. “‘It’s like you’re fighting a ghost, you’re fighting against the air.”
Or maybe it’s that there is no good defense.
Really, the problem is the White House has too many messages — and none of them very good. Consider some of the lines Trump and his allies have tried in recent days:
The call was perfect.
The emoluments clause is phony.
Adam Schiff is a corrupt liar.
Adam Schiff is the whistleblower’s secret informant.
Bill Taylor is part of a coordinated smear campaign by radical unelected bureaucrats.
Democrats are an angry pack of rabid hyenas.
What are Democrats hiding in their Soviet-style star chamber?
Human scum!
It’s a coup!
No, it’s a lynching!
No, it’s a witch hunt!
The few attempts at a coherent defense have crumbled. “No quid pro quo” became “We do that all the time.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell disputed Trump’s claim that McConnell described the Ukraine call as “innocent.” Reporting by The Post and the New York Times undermines the claims that Ukraine didn’t know the funding was withheld and that Trump’s real motive was fighting corruption.
Trump’s solution to the stream of bad news: He ordered the White House to cancel its subscriptions to those two newspapers.
That’s too bad, because Trump and his aides now won’t be able to read this coherent, straight-from-the-soul message I have developed for him, guaranteed to put an end to impeachment:
I am in way over my head.
I have no idea what’s legal or illegal.
My staff is incompetent.
I wasn’t supposed to win the election.
You can’t impeach me — because I quit.
Why can’t we use nuclear weapons against bedbugs?
Have you heard the one about the lawbreaker who got pardoned by President Trump?
It’s so funny it’s criminal.
As The Post’s Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report, Trump has told his subordinates to seize private land and disregard environmental rules as they build a border wall, offering to pardon them for breaking the law. The White House response? Trump is joking.
Hahahahahahaha. My sides are totally splitting.
That was almost as funny as the time when — stop me if you’ve heard this one — Trump told Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails. “He was joking,” the White House said.
LOL! ROFLMAO!
So deadpan was Trump’s humor then that the Russians didn’t get the joke; they began acting on Trump’s request within hours, special counsel Robert Mueller found. Now that’s funny.
And who can forget the hilarious time when Trump told law enforcement officers that they should feel free to rough up the people they arrest?
“He was making a joke,” the White House said.The incorrigible cutup! Even the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration was fooled by the president’s wickedly subtle humor. He issued a statement warning agents not to follow the president’s advice.
Trump’s emergence as a comedic genius is a recent development. Back during the campaign, Trump said he didn’t joke around: “Mexico is going to pay for the wall — believe me,” he said. “Politicians think we’re joking. We don’t joke. This is a movement, and movements don’t joke.”
That made sense, because here’s the funny thing: Trump isn’t very funny. His humor is cutting and coarse, rarely lighthearted. His unsmiling supporters took him “seriously but not literally.”
But apparently we shouldn’t take him seriously, either — because he and his aides have recast a series of ominous statements as jokes that the rest of us just didn’t get:
● Asking then-FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
● Telling a campaign crowd to take a loyalty pledge to him.
● Threatening to fire then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
● Saying “I love WikiLeaks” when it released stolen Democratic emails.
● Saying Democrats who didn’t applaud his State of the Union address were “TREASONOUS.”
● Calling himself the “Chosen One,” among other messianic claims.
● Wishing he were “president for life” or serving another “10 or 14 years.”
● Thanking Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats.
Trump is so dry that even he has difficulty determining when he’s joking. When he says his White House runs well, it’s said “jokingly, but meaning it.” His claim that former president Barack Obama founded the Islamic State is “sarcastic but not that sarcastic.”
Trump’s “joking,” therefore, is less ha-ha funny than his funny little way of blunting the damage when he says something particularly outrageous or is caught in a lie.
Now comes Axios’s report that Trump has asked aides about the efficacy of dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes. This one has the virtue of actually sounding like a joke.So far, Trump denies it, but with such frequent, frantic and doth-protest-too-much denials (“The media in our Country is totally out of control!” he tweeted Tuesday night) that the report is almost certainly true.
In public and in private, Trump has long raised questions about the point of stockpiling nuclear weapons if you never use them. The real question is why he didn’t come out with a hurricane-nuking plan earlier. It fits perfectly with his strategic thinking in its thorough lack of regard for consequences or collateral damage.
Trump isn’t fooling anyone, so he might as well take ownership of the nukes-you-can-use position. There are many ways to get more bang for the buck from our nuclear arsenal. All it takes is some out-of-the-silo thinking by the commander in chief.
After dropping one in the eye of Hurricane Dorian, he could use another one to deforest the Amazon, thereby eliminating the threat of future forest fires. A string of nuclear explosions along the southern border would prove a more effective deterrent than a wall. Nuclear fallout would swiftly eliminate the alleged bedbug infestation at Trump’s Doral club in Florida. Nuking Greenland would likely bring down the purchase price.
There’s hardly a problem Trump couldn’t eliminate with a controlled nuclear detonation. He could nuke his tax returns, nuke the Fed, nuke Obamacare, nuke the federal debt, nuke 40 pounds of body fat, nuke rare steaks, nuke opioid stockpiles, nuke measles outbreaks, nuke Democratic precincts and nuke the leech with three jaws and 59 teeth just discovered in Washington.
In the unlikely event anything were to go awry, Trump has a well-tested excuse for pressing the button: I was just joking.
Democrats’ behavior at the State of the Union was embarrassing
But the Democrats, with their childish protests, took the bait. Symbolic dissent is fine, but this was a cacophony of causes: black clothing (for #MeToo), kente ties and sashes (because of Trump’s Africa insult), butterfly stickers (for the “dreamers”), red buttons (for a victim of racial crime) and the more bipartisan purple ribbons (for the opioid epidemic).
Here’s ‘what about’ Roy Moore that is different
We’re having a severe outbreak of whataboutism.
In mild forms, the primary symptom is a vulnerability to false equivalencies. Virulent strains, such as the current one, can cause victims to lose all moral perspective.
.. Moore denies the allegations of sexual misconduct but has not denied that he was involved with girls half his age when he was in his 30s... That’s why Republican Ed Gillespie, in his Trump-style gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, ran an ad falsely accusing his opponent, Democrat Ralph Northam, of calling “restoring the rights of unrepentant sex offenders one of his greatest feats.” An ad by an outside group asked: “Does a convicted sexual predator work near your child? Ralph Northam doesn’t want you to know. . . . Tell Ralph Northam. Protect our children. Not predators.”