As his treason scandal explodes, Donald Trump’s legal team begins floating the senility defense
Back when it first became clear more than a year and a half ago that Trump-Russia election collusion was eventually going to be overwhelmingly proven, Palmer Report predicted that Donald Trump’s last line of defense would be that he was too naive, clueless, or senile to know that his entire campaign was committing treason under his nose. Guess what? We’ve finally arrived at that moment.
Now that Paul Manafort has been caught meeting with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the election, and Jerome Corsi’s emails prove that Roger Stone knew all about the stolen emails that Wikileaks was about to publish, Donald Trump’s back is fully against the wall. So how’s he playing this? Check out this stunning sentence tonight from the Washington Post: “Rudolph W. Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, said the president does not recall ever speaking to either Stone or Corsi about WikiLeaks.” And there it is.
We’ve now reached the “I don’t recall” stage of Donald Trump’s defense. Sure, maybe he treasonously conspired with Stone, Corsi, WikiLeaks, and Russia, but if he did, he doesn’t remember any of it. There is, of course, no fully functioning person who could possibly commit treason and then forget having done so. In other words, Trump is suggesting that his cognitive abilities have collapsed to the point that he’s suffering from a level of senility or dementia.
Whether you believe Donald Trump’s cognitive abilities are that far gone or not, it’s clear that it’s the defense he’s now going with. That’s generally a sign that he’s got no other possible avenues of defense remaining. So now what? This particular defense almost never works except in the movies. Bring it on.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report