National Public Radio has posted a transcript of yesterday's Trump-Putin joint news conference in Helsinki. I have just a few observations that are half a step or so off what is becoming quite a worn path.
1. I watched it live and am surprised at the strong reaction. Yes, it was outrageous, but Trump didn't say anything he hasn't said before--a hundred times or more. Only the hypothesis regarding the 400-pound man lying in bed and hacking into the DNC was absent. It is surprising, I suppose, that Trump, while sharing an international stage with Putin, lacked the wit to retire for one day his normal schtick meant for the consumption of MAGA hat owners. But is it really surprising? He's Trump.
2. I wouldn't be me if I didn't note that one of the golden oldies that he played on the Helsinki stage relates to his election victory and the electoral college. From the transcript:
TRUMP: Well, I'm going to let the president answer the second part of that question. But, as you know, the whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win because the electoral college is much more advantageous for the Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. We won the electoral college by a lot. 306 to 223, I believe.
Actually, the whole question was directed to Putin, so naturally it didn't have anything to do with America's 18th-century election contraption or the magnitude of Trump's victory. That he could not suppress the impulse to leap in with misinformation about a subject that Putin hadn't been asked about shows how dear this topic is to Trump. Though it seems he must have endlessly and lovingly caressed every detail, he can't get anything right. For one thing, his "score" is wrong. (On election night, Trump won 306 electoral votes to Clinton's 232; when the electors later met, seven voted for neither Trump nor Clinton, with the result that the tally became 304 to 227.) And what is the evidence for the claim that the electoral college "is much more advantageous for the Democrats, as you know"? That "as you know" is wildly incongruous considering that Trump's electoral college win was achieved despite losing the popular vote by around 2.9 million. In the last five presidential elections, the Democrat has received more votes four times, but has won in the electoral college just twice. The evidence for the Democrats' great advantage must be quite subtle!
3. It always seemed odd and suspicious that Trump should have insisted on his meeting with Putin being private, with only translators present. Now that we know what he said afterwards, for public consumption, the content of the private meeting--which lasted about 2.5 hours, more than an hour longer than scheduled--should be a matter of grave concern. There is a tendency, unjustified by reason, to think that the whole truth can't be much worse than what is already known. Maybe natural selection prefers optimism, because we always think we're getting close to the bottom of the hole. But what if we're not? Jonathan Chait has more on this disturbing question.
Comments