|
On September 25, in advance of the release of the not-quite-transcript of the Ukraine call, Trump began trying to set expectations, Bill Barr-style, by saying that Democrats would have to apologize once they saw the document.
And then, once the document was in the wild, Trump went back to insisting that, however bad it might look, there was no direct quid pro quo.
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
“You don’t see a direct quid pro quo in this.” @BretBaier
48.1K
11:25 AM - Sep 25, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
20.3K people are talking about this
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
“He (President Trump) didn’t specifically mention the explicit quid pro quo of…unless you investigate this…we’re going to withhold military aid to you.” Pamela Brown
47.3K
11:56 AM - Sep 25, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
19.8K people are talking about this
You may have forgotten, but on the morning of the document release, Trump’s allies set expectations reasonably high in their insistence that the whistleblower report had dramatically overpromised any wrongdoing by the president. This turned out to be incorrect and most unbiased observers were fairly gobsmacked by what Trump had said.
To take just one example, hours before the document was released, Chris Christie confidently predicted that Trump would be totally in the clear so long as he didn’t say something terribly incriminating, such as “do me a favor.” Which, of course, is almost exactly what Trump said (“I would like you to do us a favor though”).
The end result was that by the next day, September 26, the new line was that Trump had not committed a high crime or misdemeanor.
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
“Is there a case for impeachment? Absolutely not! There is no high crime or misdemeanor, no crime, no extortion, no treason.” Robert Ray @FoxNews
73.6K
12:21 PM - Sep 26, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
32.5K people are talking about this
Over the next two days, Trump went back to some of his previous positions: That the whistleblower report was “inaccurate,” that the account of the call was “completely different and at odds” with the actual conversation, and there may have been a “spy” involved.
On September 28 he brought out a new line of attack: whataboutism.
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!
108K
8:16 AM - Sep 28, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
73.9K people are talking about this
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what it would have been like had Republicans been such “do nothings” in regard to Barack Obama that they had, say, refused to vote on a nomination to the Supreme Court. Or try to imagine Republicans being so convinced of Obama’s illegitimacy that certain of them spent eight years obsessing over whether or not his birth certificate was a forgery.
It boggles the mind.
|