Where are your president’s handlers when he needs them? Does he even have handlers? Is there anyone in the White House in charge of making sure he doesn’t say stupid stuff to the media he is so critical of? Apparently not, because this latest thing is a doozy.
In an interview with the New York Times Wednesday, Donald Trump said that he would never have given one of his earliest supporters, now-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the job if he had known the former senator from Alabama would recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
Trump said he feels betrayed by Sessions because his recusal led to the appointment of a special counsel, which Trump says never should have happened.
“Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump told the Times.
(Sessions’ recusing himself was a matter of ethics, so basically, your president just admitted that he’s not hiring people in the service of the American people; he’s hiring people who will bend to his will.)
Trump also complained about former FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in May, as well as Robert Mueller, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump accused Comey of trying to save his job by leveraging a dossier of compromising material on the president. He also took issue with the acting FBI director and the deputy attorney general who recommended Comey’s dismissal.
Not only did Trump unironically say that Mueller is running an office full of conflicts of interest, but he also issued a veiled threat and warned investigators against looking into matters that move away from the Russia investigation.
(What?! No, really. The irony is making me constipated.)
Your president said, “Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair—and that’s a mild word—to the president.”
Aww. Everyone has hurt the president’s feelings.
Listen to this brief snippet of the interview and tell us what you think.
Read more at the New York Times.