Trump’s Continuing Disgrace

By Philip Klein

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

President Trump has already inflicted more than enough damage on the country simply because his fragile ego prevented him from acknowledging that he lost the 2020 election. But the January 6 Capitol riot, which followed months of him whipping supporters into a frenzy with his stolen election claims, did not teach him to be more responsible with his rhetoric. So he spent this past weekend making one reckless statement after another — consequences be damned.

 

During a Saturday rally in Texas, Trump said of prosecutors investigating him and his business practices that, “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

 

His defenders would no doubt argue that Trump specified “demonstrations” and only if something done was “wrong or illegal.” But we know that Trump has a low threshold for “wrong and illegal” when it comes to prosecutors targeting him, and we saw on January 6 what happens when he summons a mob to demonstrate after convincing them of rampant corruption in the country and in the elections.

 

He also vowed that if reelected, he would consider pardoning January 6 rioters. “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

 

So, the overall message he communicated was that if people riot on his behalf, that he would have their back if reelected.

 

Trump topped things off with a statement issued on Sunday night once again falsely claiming that Mike Pence, as vice president, had the ability to change the outcome of the election. The statement ends, “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump isn’t using some of the more coded language of his Republican defenders, many of who deny there was an effort to overturn the election. Instead, Trump is explicitly stating that he believes Pence should have “overturned the election”

 

No matter how much damage he causes to the country, Trump will never learn anything from the consequences of his actions. The only way to start to change things is for Republican voters pick somebody else in 2024 who does not behave like Trump. Until then, he is not going anywhere, and elected Republicans will remain too afraid to criticize him for fear of retribution should he return to power.