During an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends Wednesday, Donald Trump made the argument that if he were ever to be impeached, “everybody would be very poor.”
The very unstable genius rambled his way through the interview, patting himself on the back, throwing out “facts” and “figures” to illustrate how successful his presidency has been, and even managed to invoke the name of Barack Obama, all while also dodging questions pertaining to former close associates of his—Paul Manafort and attorney Michael Cohen—who are involved in high profile federal cases stemming from the special counsel investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Earhardt asked Trump if he believed Democrats would try to impeach him if they were able to take back the power in Congress.
Trump said, “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job. If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor.”
Trump told Earhardt that he has always had controversy in his life, and he’s always succeeded, and he’s always won.
“It was controversial when I ran, and I won. Now the country is doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump bragged. “We have the best economy we’ve ever had in the history of our country—and more jobs today, literally today, we have more jobs and more people working in the United States than ever before in the history of our country. Black unemployment, Asian unemployment, women unemployment, Hispanic unemployment—historic lows. It’s been an amazing thing, and unfortunately, the media never covers that. They don’t like to cover that kind of thing; they like to cover nonsense, but it’s one of those things.”
Earhardt brought up Michael Cohen and asked Trump about his relationship with him. Trump downplayed his relationship with his former attorney, and seemed to want to make the point that the things Cohen pleaded guilty to were not even campaign violations—so, you know, what’s the big deal?
Earhardt then asked Trump about the payments Cohen admitted to making at his behest.
“Did you direct him to make these payments?” Earhardt asked.
“He made the deal. He made the deals,” Trump said. “And by the way, he pled to two counts that aren’t a crime, which nobody understands. I watched a number of shows—sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows—those two counts aren’t even a crime. They weren’t campaign finance.”
“Did you know about the payments?” Earhardt asked more directly.
“Later on I knew. Later on,” Trump said. “But you have to understand, Ainsley, what he did—and they weren’t taken out of campaign finance.”
Trump argued that the big point everyone is missing is that what Cohen has admitted to is not a campaign violation. He then brought up President Obama, saying he had “a massive campaign violation” but “he had a different attorney general and they viewed it a lot differently. You know we have somebody that they seem to like to go after a lot of Republicans. But he settled his very easily. In fact, I put that out very recently. So Obama had it, other people have it, almost everybody that runs for office has campaign violations—but what Michael Cohen pled to are not even campaign violations.”
Trump alleged that Cohen is flipping on him because it is helping him get a better deal to serve less time in jail. Trump said he has seen this many times and has had friends involved with it, and “it should almost be illegal.”
Trump then derailed the conversation by talking about something completely unrelated to him, his presidency, the current Department of Justice investigation or anything—condeming the Democrats and his Justice Department.
“I put in an attorney general that never took control of the Justice Department—Jeff Sessions. He never took control of the Justice Department,” Trump said.
Trump went on to accuse Mueller as having a conflict of interest and being best friends with James Comey.
“Are you considering pardoning Paul Manafort?” Earhardt asked.
Trump spoke glowingly of Manafort while disparaging both Hillary Clinton and people who have worked for her. He said he didn’t know Manafort well because he wasn’t with the campaign long. He said a bunch of other stuff too, but it was mostly rambling nonsense that completely avoided the question he was asked.
“Is the press the enemy of the people?” Earhardt asked Trump.
“No, not at all, but the fake news is, and the fake news is comprised of a lot—it’s a big chunk, OK? Somebody said, ‘What’s the chunk?’ I said, ‘80 percent.’ It’s a lot. It’s a lot,” Trump said. “If I do something well, it’s not reported. Other than in the 20 percent. The New York Times cannot write a good story about me. They’re crazed; they are like lunatics. If I do something well—I often joke—I’ll do some great thing, like meeting with Kim Jong Un. That was a great success. Hey, they have been working on this for so many years, and they’ve got nothing. I just left—three months ago or less—I just left Singapore, you’ve had no missiles shot, no rockets shot, no nuclear testing, and I got back our hostages.”
It’s worth watching the entire interview just to see the lengths he and his inflated ego are willing to go to give the impression that he is a good president.
It’s amazing that none of his handlers try to stop him from obviously going off script and speaking complete and utter nonsense. Everything is always everyone else’s fault: The media is mean to him. Jeff Sessions won’t cooperate with his inane missions to obstruct justice and prevent the Russia investigation from continuing.
Obama, Obama, Obama.
It’s almost as if we have a dissatisfied kindergartner in the highest office in the land.
The most maddening part about all of this is that Fox News essentially functions as a PR firm for the president. They will never call him out or hold him accountable for anything.
They will simply continue to enable his bad behavior.