With his administration crumbling around him, Donald Trump appears to finally be cracking under the intense pressure of the last few days. The nation has now seen two former intimate associates of Trump’s found guilty in federal court, each of financial crimes, although of a different nature for both. And Trump seems comfortable for now pretending that his former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s trial will never concern him, despite ten more looming charges from this trial and an upcoming court appearance for which the prosecution has declared they have “three times the evidence” as was presented in Manafort’s first trial that resulted in conviction on 8 charges.
It’s his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s case that has him frazzled, it appears.
It was a plea deal that he somehow didn’t see coming, and one which he either still mistakenly thinks don’t implicate him in a crime or which his legal team has carefully coached him to underplay the significance of. We showed you a part of the interview that Trump did with Ainsley Earhardt of the Fox News Network yesterday, in which he accidentally implicated himself in campaign finance violations, obviating the need for Cohen’s testimony in the first place. But someone must have explained it to him finally since he was tweeting what seem to be the only five words he even knows anymore at 1 AM Eastern:
NO COLLUSION – RIGGED WITCH HUNT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
In the extended interview with Earhardt that finally aired in its entirety this morning, Trump was all over the map with wild statements, outright lies about easily disproved historical facts, and he even at one point declared that “flipping” — the practice of turning state’s evidence on a co-conspirator in order to obtain a reduced sentence — should itself be illegal.
That’s possibly the most ridiculous thing he said during the entire interview, or at least, the funniest thing he said about his legal troubles.
When Earhardt asked him about his prospects for impeachment should the Democrats win back Congress in November, Trump was circumspect in his assessment. Where you might normally expect Trump to declare that he would never be convicted, or that the House would never even try to impeach someone as popular as he is — in his own mind, of course — Trump instead decided to publicly try and perhaps dissuade them from that course of action:
You know, I guess it says something like high crimes and all — I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who has done a great job.”
Trump went on to describe the dystopia he imagines for America if he is removed from office for the crimes he’s now known to have committed:
I’ll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor. Because without this thinking [points to own skull], you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse.”
He is truly losing his mind at this point, and the next 76 days will likely get more and more crazy until November.
Featured image via screen capture
