Not content to mar the Coast Guard Academy commencement with a carnival of self-pity on Wednesday, President Trump emerged from a Twitter hiatus on Thursday to claim the mantle of political martyrdom. Pardon me a moment while I shed a single tear for the Tyler Durden of American presidents.
The through-the-fingers fight scenes are bloody. And the beat-downs endured by the narrator and Durden are intense. There’s only one hitch: Durden isn’t real. All the punches thrown and taken by the two are really the act of one person, the narrator. By the end of the movie you realize that all those hits and missing teeth were self-inflicted. A perfect metaphor for the Trump presidency.
On Monday, Dafna Linzer of NBC tweeted out a handy cheat sheet of the previous seven days.
Last seven days: pic.twitter.com/iA5Io6HgqA
— Dafna Linzer (@DafnaLinzer) May 16, 2017
Monday: Learned that Obama warned Trump about FlynnTuesday: Trump fires Comey “on recommendation” of RosensteinWednesday: Trump meets with Lavrov, Kislyek [sic]. TASS photog allowed into Oval Office.Thursday: Trump says he was going to fire Comey no matter what, did it thinking about Russia investigationFriday: Trump suggests he has “tapes” of Comey …Monday: Trump, it turns out, shared highly classified intel with Russians.
And so much more has happened since The Post broke the stunning news Monday about Trump’s Oval Office intel brag to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. On Tuesday, the New York Times broke the news that after a February meeting in the Oval Office, then-FBI Director James B. Comey wrote a memo to file noting that Trump told him “I hope you can let this go.” “This” was the investigation into fired national security adviser Michael Flynn in particular. Then, on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced his appointment of former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel “to assume responsibility” for the federal investigation into Russian interference in the November election.
I’m exhausted just having to type all that. And we know quite a few White House staffers are worn out, too. That’s because the guy at the top of the pyramid continually punches himself in the face, then blames startled onlookers for their own aghast reactions at his self-destruction.
“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” Trump said to laughter. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Thursday morning, the president found his way back onto Twitter to decry what he sees as persecution.
This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!
I suppose Trump should know about witch hunts. The former reality-television star and real estate developer used his national platform to wage one by perpetuating the birther lie against President Barack Obama. That’s the racist assertion that the first African American president was an illegal occupier of the White House because the detractors wrongly believe Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii. Trump repeatedly flogged the idea that Obama’s birth certificate was false. He even bragged that investigators he said he sent to Hawaii “cannot believe what they’re finding.” We have yet to see what he says they found.
Trump then took the pitchforks he rounded up around the country and turned it into a presidential campaign that stormed into the White House fueled by a volatile mix of racial resentment and economic anxiety. He sold the nation a bill of goods about his competence to helm the most important enterprise in human history. And now that near-hourly news alerts are proving Trump to be ill-equipped and ill-suited for the job, he is lashing out at everyone except the one person responsible for his pitiful state.
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