As previewed by Paul Ryan, the GOP defense of Donald Trump is shifting to a “he’s not a criminal, he’s just too ignorant to know better.”
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) put forth an excuse for President Trump’s efforts to influence the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump team and Russia’s efforts to manipulate America’s presidential election. Ryan did not dispute the factual content of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rather, he claimed that Trump was too new to politics to understand that what he was doing was wrong.
Sure. Okay. People outside of politics can’t be expected to know all those fancy rules like not lying and that it’s wrong to lean on underlings.
Now Ryan is getting some support. It’s not that Trump is really obstructing justice. It’s just that he’s such a rube that it looks like he’s obstructing justice.
Republican Rep. David Schweikert said in a radio interview Thursday that President Donald Trump might lack the language discipline to avoid giving the appearance of interfering in an investigation.
Schweikert said Trump may not have learned the discipline because he's not from the "political class."
The awful thing is that Ryan and Schweikert are probably right—in his business life, Trump pressured employees and summarily fired people all the time. It’s less an argument that Trump is ignorant, and more a case that he’s always been a privileged jackass. But the truth is that Trump knew it was wrong.
Schweikert is ready to use the poor language skills excuse to erase any hint of obstruction.
"This may be one of those occasions where we're going to have to go through several months of the news cycle and discomfort to finally figure out, saying, 'OK, this was just ill-used language. This is absolutely innocent, or here's something that's been wrong,'" he said.
Of course, Republicans giving Trump the Stupid card are ignoring the actual evidence.
In June 2016, amid an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private email server while she was secretary of state, Bill Clinton met with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac in Phoenix. It is not known whether the two discussed the investigation and Bill Clinton was not at the time imbued with the power and majesty of a sitting president of the United States.
The response by Trump and his supporters to reports of this meeting proves that he knew that even the appearance of an effort to interfere with an ongoing FBI investigation was dead wrong. “I think it’s so terrible. I think it’s so horrible. I think it’s the biggest story, one of the big stories of this week, of this month, of this year,” Trump said. “Even in terms of judgment, how bad a judgment is it for him or for her to do this? I mean, who would do this?” He added, “I’m just flabbergasted by it. I think it’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
He’s seen something like it now. Several times. Firsthand.