Donald Trump opens his big mouth and blows his Trump-Russia cover
Over the past week a rare and remarkable phenomenon has played out: Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted anything. Tweets have been posted to his account, sure, but they’ve been so tame and on-message that they’ve either been written under the supervision of a staffer, or written by a staffer. Trump has been under the watchful eye of his staff during the entirety of this Asia trip, meaning he hasn’t been able to say anything self-incriminating in the Trump Russia scandal – until now.
Trump’s staff has been able to keep him from rage-tweeting during the trip, and they’d largely managed to keep him away from reporters. However, that all changed today when Trump opened his mouth and tried to explain how he knows that Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t rig the election his behalf: “Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I believe, I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it. But he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
That remark is such a monumental mistake on Trump’s part, he might as well have simply yelled “I’m guilty.” Trump is now squarely taking the word of a foreign enemy over the word of every smart person in the United States. The quote shook Americans so thoroughly that “Putin” immediately became the top trending topic on Twitter. Just to make clear where his loyalties lie, Trump went even further, dismissing the U.S. intelligence community as being a bunch of “political hacks.”
In the past two weeks, various Donald Trump campaign advisers including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page have flatly admitted to having met with or conspired with the Russian government during the election. They’ve in turn fingered higher level Trump campaign officials, some of whom are now admitting they knew all along. Trump’s campaign chairman is now under house arrest in relation to the Trump-Russia scandal. Trump just picked the worst time possible to announce that his loyalty is not to America, but to Putin.
